
^ 



C^atMic n2?oob ^focum feecfures. 



THE 



Chalcedonian Decree 



OR 



HISTORICAL CHRISTIANITY, MISREPRESENTED BY MODERN 

THEOLOGY, CONFIRMED BY MODERN SCIENCE, AND 

UNTOUCHED BY MODERN CRITICISM 



JOHN FULTON, D.D., LLD. 



MAY X7 1832 ) 
NEW YORK X..^,.,,,,,;^ 

THOMAS WHITTAKER /3r/7 X 

2 AND 3 Bible House ^^^ 

1892 



•^ 



"BT 1 101 
.Fst 



Copyright, 1892, 
By THOMAS WHITTAKER 



ERRATUM. 

Page 88, line ii from bottom, for ''homogeneity," read 
heterogeneity . 



.Fst 



®^Ije Cbarlotte Wooir Slocum ^ettures. 



The Charlotte Wood Slocum Lectureship on Chris- 
tian Evidences was endowed in 1890 by the lamented lady 
whose name it bears, the wife of Elliott T. Slocum, Esq., of 
Detroit, in grateful memory of the life and labours of the 
Right Reverend Samuel Smith Harris, D. D. , LL. D., the 
second Bishop of Michigan. Mrs. Slocum departed this 
life in Dresden, 6th June, 1891. 

Bishop Harris, — to quote his own words — " moved by 
the importance of bringing all practicable Christian influ- 
ences to bear upon the great body of students annually 
assembled at the University of Michigan, undertook to 
promote and set in operation a plan of Christian work at 
said University, and collected contributions for that pur- 
pose, of which plan the following outline is here given, 
that is to say : — 

To erect a building or hall near the University, in which 
there should be cheerful parlors, a well-equipped reading- 
room, and a lecture-room where the lectures hereinafter men- 
tioned might be given; 

To endow a lectureship similar to the Bampton Lecture- 
ship in England, for the establishment and defence of 
Christian truth: the lectures on such foundation to be de- 
livered annually at Ann Arbor by a learned clergyman or 
other communicant of the Protestant Episcopal Church. 

To endow two other lectureships, one on Biblical Liter- 
ature and Learning, and the other on Christian Evidences: 



IV THE CHARLOTTE WOOD SLOCUM LECTURES. 



the object of such lectureships to be to provide for all the 
students who may be willing to avail themselves of them a 
complete course of instruction in sacred learning, and in 
the philosophy of right thinking and right living, without 
which no education can justly be considered complete. 

The first of the Lectureships projected by Bishop Harris, 
that for the establishment and defence of Christian truth, 
was endowed in 1886 by the Hon. Henry P. Baldwin and 
wife. The second to be founded is that on Christian 
Evidences, and it is in fulfilment of the earnest wish of the 
Founder, that the first course is given by the Rev. John 
Fulton, D. D., LL. D. The Lecturer is appointed upon 
the nomination of the Bishop of Michigan, 

As Mrs. Slocum executed no deed of trust when she 
placed in my hands Ten Thousand Dollars for the object 
aboved named, I have thought it advisable to appoint as 
Trustees of this Fund those gentlemen who are charged 
with the trust of the foundation for the Baldwin ^lecture- 
ship; viz., 

Messrs. Henry P. Baldwin, 

Henry A. Hayden, 
Sidney D. Miller, 
Henry P. Baldwin, 2nd., 
Hervy C. Parke, 

with the addition of Mr. Elliott T. Slocum. 

THOMAS F. DAVIES, 

Bishop of Michigan. 
Detroit^ November^ j8gi. 



PREFACE. 



As the sheets of this volume have come to me from the 
press, I have sincerely appropriated the lines of the poet: 

Dum relego, scripsisse pudet, quia plurima cerno, • 
Me quoque qui feci judice, digna lini; 

and if I had in any way sought, or if I had not done all 
that I could rightly do to avoid, a task which I knew to be 
so gravely important, and for which I knew myself to be 
so ill qualified, I should feel that I had been much to 
blame. 

Such as they are, these lectures were intended mainly to 
clear the way for abler and more competent lecturers by 
showing first, what historical Christianity is; second, that 
it is obnoxious to none of the moral objections to which 
provincial and popular opinions have exposed it; third, 
that it is in no way invalidated, but marvellously confirmed, 
by the progress of physical science; and fourth, that it is 
not so much as touched by any of the so-called results of 
biblical criticism. Allowing for the conditions imposed by 
the form of composition, I think this four-fold purpose 



vi PREFACE. 

may be seen to have been kept clearly in view from first to 
last. 

In a work published ten years ago * I made a critical 
study of the Decree of Chalcedon as an authoritative, and, 
to this day, unrepealed, settlement of the Faith of Historical 
Christianity. I have reason to believe that the arguments 
set forth in that work have commended themselves to men 
of widely different tendencies. I have therefore allowed 
myself to hope that a more popular treatment of the same 
subject might be useful. If the view which I have pre- 
sented is just, Christianity is at once relieved of nine tenths 
of the objections, ethical, scientific and critical, which are 
alleged against it; nine tenths of all the grounds of the 
divisions of Christendom appear to have been factitious; 
the existence of a substantial unity of faith is evident; and 
the only possible basis of visible unity in the future is made 
plain. 

In a work of this kind originality is impossible, and I 
should certainly have no sense of humiliation in borrowing 
from the learned and accomplished writers of ' ' Lux Mun- 
di." The fact is, however, that I did not read that work 
until these lectures were out of hand, and consequently my 
thesis, that the Triune God of the Nicene Creed is the only 
God in which modern science has left it possible to believe, 
was not suggested by the admirable paper of Canon Aubrey 
Moore. I have held the same view for thirty years, and 
the advance of science during that period has tended only 
to illustrate and confirm it. I am deeply conscious that 
* " Index Canonum," New York: E. & J. B. Young & Co. 



PREFACE. Yii 



the treatment of the subject in the Fifth Lecture is defec- 
tive; but I am sure that it is in the line of truth, and I can- 
not but hope that it may suggest a better treatment to some 
far more competent apologist than I can pretend to be. 

It is a pleasure to me to know that what I have said 
concerning the higher criticism of the Holy Scriptures rep- 
resents not only my own belief but that of Bishop Harris, 
as he expressed it to me only a few weeks before he sailed 
on his last voyage. It is a still greater pleasure to believe 
that he would not have dissented in the main from any- 
thing contained in these lectures. J. F. 



•CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY, .... I 

LECTURE 11. 

WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? . . . . 'S3 

LECTURE IIL 

THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE, . . ^ . . 6^ 

LECTURE IV. 

THE NICENE CREED, ...... IO3 

LECTURE V. 

THE GOD OF SCIENCE IS THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY, 139 

LECTURE VL 

CONCLUSION, , .183 



LECTURE I. 
MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY 



LECTURE I. 

MEMVI^IAL AISTD INTRODUCTORY. 

I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the 
dead which die in the Lord from henceforth. Yea, saith the Spirit, 
that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them. 
— Rev. xiv. 13. 

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. — I Thess. v. 21. 

Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast 
believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. 
John xx. 29. 

Truth, which only doth judge itself, teachelh that the inquiry of truth, 
which is the love-making or wooing of it — the knowledge of truth, 
which is the presence of it— and the belief of truth, which is the enjoy- 
ing of it — is the sovereign good of human nature. — Bacon. 

To fear argument is to doubt the conclusion. — Newman. 

Our knowledge being very narrow, and we not happy enough to find 
certain truth in everything which we have occasion to consider, most of 
the propositions we think, reason, discuss, nay, act upon, are such as we 
cannot have perfect knowledge of their truth. Yet some of them border 
so near upon certainty that we make no doubt at all about them, but 
assent to them as firmly, and act according to that assent as resolutely, 
as if they were infallibly demonstrated. — LoCKE. 

The undulatory theory of light and its radiant energy are accepted facts 
in the creed of science; yet the ether itself is only a hypothesis, and the 
undulations are an inference. — Tyndal. 

Nothing worthy proving can be proven, 
Nor yet disproven. Wherefore be thou wise, 
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt. 

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.— Tennyson. 

3 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 



Believing as I do in the continuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly 
where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind 
authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual 

necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence 

This . . . is the habitual action of the scientific mind. — Tyndal. 

Those who think that science is dissipating religious beliefs and senti- 
ments seem to be unaware that whatever of mystery is taken from the 
old interpretation is added to the new. Or rather, we may say that 
transference from the one to the other is accompanied by increase ; since, 
for an explanation which has a seeming feasibility, science substitutes an 
explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, there leaves 
us in the presence of the avowedly inexplicable. — Herbert Spencer. 

A science without mystery is unknown; a religion without mystery is 
absurd. — Darwin. 

In the numberless attempts to attack, or defend, or find a substitute 
for Theism, the Christian or Trinitarian teaching about God rarely ap- 
pears upon the scene Ordinary people take it for granted 

that Trinitarianism is a sort of extra demand made on Christian faith, 
and that the battle must really be fought on the Unitarian basis. . . 
So far from the Trinity being, in Mr. Gladstone's unfortunate phrase, 
*the scaffolding of a purer theism,' non-Christian monotheism was the 
scaffolding through which already the outlines of the future might be 
seen. For the modern world the Christian doctrine of God remains as the 
only safeguard in reason for a permanent theistic belief. — Rev. Aubrey 
Moore, M. A. 



The opening of a course of lectures founded by the late 
Mrs. Slocum in memory of the late Bishop Harris, is an 
event which illustrates in a very touching way the shortness 
and uncertainty of human life. 

It is little more than twelve years since I attended Dr. 
Harris, then in the very prime of life, in the strength of a 
vigorous and healthful manhood, and in all the glow of 
generous and enthusiastic self-devotion, to be consecrated 
to the high office of Bishop of Michigan. It was then that 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 



I had first the happiness to meet the foundress of this lec- 
tureship in the flower and bloom of womanhood, and al- 
ready enriched with "honor, love, obedience, troops of 
friends " and many other blessings which are commonly re- 
served as the reward of venerable and revered old age. Now 
both are gone, and the place that knew and honored them 
shall know them no more. 

It was not long after their first meeting before these two 
became friends. They were alike in mind, in taste, in as- 
piration; alike in loftiness of spirit, alike in gentleness of 
courtesy, alike in their clear purity of soul. In my frequent 
visits to Dr. Harris at his See I seldom failed to meet her ; 
and when I met her, it was always to receive from her, for 
his sake and as his friend, hospitalities so kindly personal 
that they seemed to be extended to me for my own sake, 
and as her own friend. Little more than three years have 
passed away since I met her at his open grave to see the 
kindly earth close over all that was left of our dear friend, 
her Bishop and my brother of many years. Only two years 
more and the shadow of death fell on her, too; and it was 
then, in the full prospect of her approaching end, that she 
begged me to edit for her a small volume of selections 
which she had copied with her own hand from the unpub- 
lished writings of Bishop Harris. It is a happiness to me 
to know that the little book, prepared in memory of him, 
became a consolation to herself when lying on her death- 
bed in a foreign land, and that its pages brought her messages, 
not as from the dead, but as from the living, of that glorious 
immortality without the hope of which both life and death 



6 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

are gloomy and inexplicable mysteries. It was character- 
istic of Mrs. Slocum that, on the very day when she received 
from her physician what she fully understood to be a sen- 
tence of death, she made arrangements for the endowment 
of this lectureship, and at the same time requested her 
Bishop, the Right Reverend Dr. Davies, to appoint me to 
deliver the inaugural course of lectures on the new founda- 
tion. It was a duty which I would gladly have avoided ; 
for you will understand, as I have always understood, that 
the reason of my appointment was not any special qualifica- 
tion of mine for the duty devolved upon me, but only the 
long and dear and confidential friendship which existed be- 
tween your late Bishop and myself. In short, the honor 
done to me was done for his sake, and was meant to be an 
additional but incidental tribute of love to him. So done 
and so meant, it was an honor which I could not properly 
decline. 

The subject of discourse proposed to lecturers on this 
foundation was likewise meant, I think, to be a sympathetic 
tribute to Bishop Harris. It is commonly supposed that 
Bishops and other clergymen are morally bound, and are 
intellectually able, to pass their lives in perfect and unfal- 
tering certitude of all the truths of Christianity. It is not 
so. There can be no moral obligation to escape the Provi- 
dence of God ; and it is the Providence of God which some- 
times permits the truest of His saints to be doubtful, as the 
Apostle, St. Thomas, was caused or suffered to be doubtful, 
of divine truths. Neither is it intellectually possible for 
men of active and veracious minds to escape the sore trial 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 



of doubt in an age like this ; and those to whom the defence 
and propagation of the faith have been specially committed 
are required by the obligations of their office to put them- 
selves int'O special danger of doubt, because, if they would 
resolve the questions of their age for other men, they must 
first endeavor to study them so candidly as to appreciate 
and feel their difficulty. Besides, in the Church, as in all 
living bodies, there is a continuous process of growth, and 
growth includes a constant casting out of old and worn 
material as well as the assimilation of fresh nourishment. 
Naturally, it is in men of great intellectual and spiritual 
faculties that this twofold process goes on most powerfully, 
and, at times, most painfully. They are called of God to 
travail that in other souls truth may be born without travail 
and without pain. It was surely not in the nature of your 
late Bishop to evade that part of his function as a Master in 
Israel. He did not evade it. When a point seemed to be 
fairly made against Christianity, he endeavored to appreciate 
its full force, believing that an honest study of it would re- 
sult either in a satisfactory solution of the difficulty or in an 
elimination from his conception of Christianity of something 
which does not properly belong to it. For years it was my 
pleasure to see his mind grow in clearness and strength of 
conviction by that honest method of investigation. I have 
known the day, sometimes the very hour, when some old 
misapprehension fell like a scale from his eyes, only to leave 
essential truth clearer than before. It has been said that he 
changed some of his views even after he became a Bishop. 
That is true. He did, undoubtedly, change some of his 



8 . MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

views. I doubt whether any single view of his was quite 
the same in his last days a?s when I first knew him. It was 
impossible that the views of such a man should not be 
changed during twenty years of growth, and I suppose that 
some changes of his later years were not so much changes 
belonging to that period as recognitions of a change that 
had really occurred long before. Yet the greatest change 
of all did certainly occur while he was Bishop of Michigan. 
It was then that he passed through one of those intense and 
almost desperate soul-struggles which seem to be necessary 
in the education of the saints. In a time of sore affliction, 
and beside a new-made grave, the light of faith faded and he 
groped for many days in intellectual and spiritual gloom. 
I have often thought that the immediate cause of that crisis 
— for it was a crisis — in his life was largely physical. His 
weary brain lost for a time its wonted power, and what he 
took to be an eclipse of faith was rather a collapse of physi- 
cal strength. Whatever its cause was, it was met with per- 
fect honesty. As he afterwards said to me, it was a matter 
of life and death to him to ascertain beyond the possibility 
of further question where he must thenceforth stand. So, 
for many days he shut himself up in the retirement of his 
study, and there, alone with God, he searched and proved 
the groundwork of his faith. Again the light shone down 
upon him, never more to fade in this world or any other ; 
but after such an experience, no man ever sees things as he 
did before. Things that once looked large dwindle to in- 
significance, while other things stand out pre-eminent in new 
and marvellous majesty of greatness. In the lives of saints 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY, 9 

such crises are like passages from dimly lighted chambers 
into the full light of day. So this crisis was to Bishop 
Harris. Thenceforth, I think, his Christian faith was sim- 
pler, stronger and incomparably more assured and more se- 
rene than it had ever been before ; but I know he felt that 
much of the bitterness of that trial might have been spared 
him, if the present state of Christian apologetics had been 
more satisfactory, and particularly if the essential verities 
of Christianity had been more clearly discriminated than 
they generally are from the mass of doctrinal opinions which 
are often set forth as essential elements of Christianity. Had 
he been called to name a subject of discourse for such a 
lectureship as this, I believe he would have named the Evi- 
dences of Christianity ; and therefore I believe it was a true 
and sympathetic insight which led Mrs. Slocum to select 
that as the subject of a lectureship established to perpetuate 
his sacred memory. 

But she chose it also, I believe, because, in some re- 
spects, her own experience was not unlike that of her 
friend and Bishop. She was no unwomanly sceptic, but 
neither was she unaffected by the questions of our age. A 
mind like hers could not fail to understand and feel the 
force of many of the sceptical arguments which now find 
their way into all literature, permanent and ephemeral, and 
she could not be expected to be always ready with an an- 
swer. In a word, she suffered more or less — I know not 
how much — from what has been called '' the malady of our 
time,'' a malady which will yet prove, I trust, to have been 
the growing pains of a new spring-time in the spiritual pro- 



10 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

gress of mankind. Suffer as she might, however, and per- 
plexed though she might sometimes be, she clung with all 
her heart to Christ and His religion, ''believing where she 
could not prove," and feeling sure that there must be 
proofs, if she only knev/ them, of the hope that lived in 
her without them. So, I think she won the blessing of 
Him who said, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and 
yet have believed." I think, too, that it was out of her 
own personal experience that she learned the great need r^nd 
the high value of Christian apologetics; and while she chose 
the Christian Evidences as the subject of this lectureship 
first and chiefly in honor of Bishop Harris, I believe she 
would have chosen it all the more if it had ever occurred to 
her to reflect that such an endowment as this would surely 
be memorial of herself as well as of him. 

It is perhaps my duty here to say that she desired the 
lecturers on this foundation to enjoy and use the utmost 
freedom in the treatment of their great subject. She did 
not wish these lectures to be merely formal repetitions of 
old arguments. Her hope was that successive lecturers 
would contribute some fruit of their own thought or their 
own research to the confirmation of the Christian Faith, or 
at least of some part of that faith, so that living thought 
might be employed in meeting and removing present 
causes of religious doubt and perplexity as they from time 
to time arise. 

For my own part I have consented to deliver this inaugu- 
ral course of lectures on the Evidences of Christianity only 
in deference to the urgently expressed wish of the Found- 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. \\ 

ress and the Bishop of the Diocese. It is a task which few 
men are competent to perform wath satisfaction to them- 
selves or others, and of the few I am not vain enough to 
count myself as one. 1 should have felt myself bound to 
decline it if I had understood it to require of me all that 
seems at first sight to be included in the title of the lecture- 
ship. To present the slightest outline of ''the Evidences 
of Christianity " in a course of six or eight lectures is hardly 
possible, and if it were, it would tax the powers of genius 
itself to array and marshal them in such a way as to make 
them evident to the reason and convincing to the heart. A 
duty which can never be performed unless some rare and 
happy conjunction of circumstances shall bring both genius 
and learning to a work of almost unimaginable difficulty, 
cannot be the duty required of a lecturer on this foundation. 
I shall endeavor presently to show the far humbler work 
which I have proposed to myself in the present course. 

First of all, however, allow me to observe that there can 
be no doubt of the need of fresh presentations of the evi- 
dences of the Christian religion. The old apologetics are 
no longer satisfactory. At the close of the nineteenth cent- 
ury, the intellectual, and therefore the religious, point of 
view has been notably changed from that of the preceding 
period. The world in which w^e live and the universe to 
which it belongs are not the same world and the same uni- 
verse to us that they were to our grand-fathers and our 
great grand-fathers. The world which, even fifty years ago, 
a Chalmers could imagine to be the spiritual center of the 
universe, has shrunk into relative insignificance, while the 



12 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY, 

universe has grown inimitably vast; and in both there has 
been found the operation of an order which transcends that 
of mechanical arrangement and seems to rise to that of or- 
ganic life. In short, whereas our forefathers thought of na- 
ture as a vast machine, we have begun to recognize in it a 
cosmos; and even now, as science prosecutes her varied 
search, we know not whereunto our thoughts shall grow, 
nor whether we may not yet be compelled to the conclusion 
that the cosmos is a living organism. 

Naturally, the idea of God has grown with our concep- 
tion of that which we are wont to call His works. It is 
a notable thing that dogmatic atheism has perished ; if it 
exists at all, it is no longer avowed ; and in believing 
minds the idea of the great Creator has grown so grandly 
that the worship of their earlier years now seems to some of 
them to have been an almost irreverent familiarity. On 
the other hand, however, there are many who hold it to be 
impossible for any human being to know anything of the 
" Inscrutable Power" which they confess to be revealed in 
the cosmos, beyond the single fact that its existence ''is 
the most certain of all things ; " but agnosticism, while it 
has nothing in common with the deism which prevailed in 
the last century, is a categorical denial of atheism. Thus 
it has come to pass that the weapons of Christian argument 
which were sharp enough in conflict with the atheists 
and deists* of a century ago, are edgeless and pointless 
against the present adversary. I do not say that those 
arguments were not substantially sound ; I hold them to 
have been valid arguments against the forms of unbelief 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 13 

they were intended to meet. Nevertheless, the existing 
scepticism, which is neither atheistic nor deistic, but agnos- 
tic, requires other and different treatment, and, I will add, 
a far nobler and more catholic conception of Christianity 
as its antidote, than that which sufficed for the treatment 
of atheism or deism. 

In the bosom of Christianity itself there has been a shift- 
ing of the intellectual point of view hardly less remarkable 
than that which has been caused by the discoveries of sci- 
ence. There was a time when Christians were so called 
because they frankly accepted Christ as the Son of Man 
and the Son of God without attempting too precisely to de- 
fine the meaning of those terms. Soon, however, the sub- 
tle Greek intellect demanded, as the Hebrew did not, that 
the Christ-idea should be philosophically adjusted to the 
conception of God and the universe ; and after all these 
ages one may perhaps be permitted charitably to believe that 
even the daring speculations of Arius, erroneous as they 
were, and disastrous to Christianity as their acceptance 
must have been, were intended as an effort to reconcile the 
divinity of Christ with the unity of God. In fact they would 
have made of Christ a sort of secondary God, and so would 
have realized the purpose of their author in no way what- 
ever Their actual result was to compel the universal 
Churchy in its corporate capacity, to do what the Alexan- 
drian presbyter had failed to do, that is, to furnish a scien- 
tific statement of the essential things of Christian theology; 
and when the undivided Catholic Church had spoken, that 
cause of questioning was at rest. Afterwards, in the Euro- 



14 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

pean world, there came a time — which we may not call an 
evil time, since all times are necessary, and therefore no 
time can be evil — when men began to think that a part of 
Christendom was competent to determine questions of faith 
and order in the name of the whole body ; and then, when 
Rome had spoken, there was supposed to be an end of con- 
troversy. In truth there was an end of nothing ; and, so 
far from endmg controversy, the excess of Roman dogma- 
tism, accompanied with enormous papal immoralities, pre- 
cipitated the revolt of the Reformation. When the author- 
ity of Rome was cast away, the reformers felt the necessity 
of some other authority to set in place of Rome, and that 
supreme authority they found ir Holy Scripture. In the 
Church of England this supremacy was stated with the ut- 
most caution ; and, as the constitutior and the essential 
doctrine of that Church remained as they had been inherited 
from the primitive Church, many things were already set- 
tled for the Church of England which the continental re- 
formers, in founding their new Churches, had to settle for 
themselves. To them the literal words of Holy Scriptures 
had an altogether divine sanction ; and although the def- 
initions of their doctrine of the Scripture were generally 
framed with praiseworthy moderation, their descendants 
began within twc or three generations to insist that the 
Holy Scriptures do not only contain God's word to man- 
kind, but that, in every line, letter and syllable, they are 
that very and infallible word itself Among most English 
speaking Protesants, and even by many members of the 
Church of England, this thoroughly rabbinical notion has 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 15 

been supposed to be the only true evangelical belief con- 
cerning Holy Scripture. Within the present century, how- 
ever, it has been rudely shaken by the application of a rigid 
scientific criticism to the text and composition of the Sacred 
Writings. Hardly had the method of Niebuhr unravelled 
the truth of ancient Roman and Greek history than it was 
felt that the same method of investigation could not be 
honestly withheld from sacred history, and as soon as text- 
ual criticism had sufficiently prepared the way, the higher 
criticism followed. I am not concerned at present with 
the results of those researches further than to note that, at 
every step, the higher criticism has made the Scriptures, as 
the sole and supreme authority of Christianity, more and 
more an object of attack, while the discoveries of science 
have made it less and less possible to defend the claims 
which popular preaching has asserted in their behalf. Thus 
the extreme assertions of popular divines on that subject — 
assertions which are without warrant from the Scriptures 
themselves, which the Primitive Church never made and 
never heard, which neither Rome nor her schoolmen imag- 
ined, which are not to be found in the catechisms, confes- 
sions or articles of the sixteenth century reformers, and 
which are nothing more or other than a sectarian opinion 
of certain English speaking Protestants of comparatively re- 
cent date — these extreme assertions have been utterly dis- 
credited by the higher criticism, and the result is seen in 
an extreme reaction both from them and from the Christian 
religion which has been represented to be bound up with 
them. This is a fact of the time which must needs call for 



16 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY, 

peculiar treatment from the Christian apologist, since the 
scepticism it has produced requires rather a vindication of 
Christianity from the unwise misrepresentations of its friends 
than a defence against the assaults of its enemies. 

These are the two chief difficulties of the present time. 
It is often said jauntily that they are only old difficulties in 
new forms, and that they have been fairly met and answered 
long ago. To a certain extent that is true. But it is not 
entirely true, and if it were, the new forms of the old dif- 
ficulties are themselves a difficulty. But it is idle to say 
that only the forms are new. The discoveries of science 
which have put so new a face on the physical universe have 
created a difficulty which is distinctly new; and the critical 
investigations of the Sacred Writings which have put so new 
a face on the whole subject to which they relate are hardly 
less new. How new they are, and how completely new a 
treatment they require, may be seen if we consider that they 
have made such work,s as those of Paley, and such " short 
and easy methods '"' as that of Leslie, simply obsolete. In 
face of the present state of criticism, Leslie's argument is 
unavailable in its original form; and yet, if precisely the 
same argument which Leslie applied to the Passover and 
the Israelites, is applied to the Holy Eucharist and the 
Christian Church, it can be made stronger and more con- 
vincing than ever. Just so, Paley's argument for the divine 
existence from the evidence of design which appears in 
nature, while it is as sound as ever against the chance-theory 
of creation, is wholly inapplicable in its original form to the 
agnostic theory of evolution, and yet is capable of a restate- 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. I7 

ment which applies both directly and powerfully to the 
difficulties of agnosticism. 

The difficulties of the time will pass away. From bald 
agnosticism there is already a notable reaction, and ere-long 
the higher criticism will be followed by a criticism still 
higher and therefore more constructive. The first turning 
ofvirgin soil often brings malaria; but, with steady cultivation 
and deep ploughing, the malaria passes, while the lands 
which were once a wilderness continue to yield wealth to the 
laborious husbandman. Let us not deceive ourselves, how- 
ever. When the present difficulties have passed, others are 
certain to appear; and this process will continue to the end 
of time 

As long as men run to and fro on this earth, the sum of 
human knowledge will be increased; and larger knowledge 
of things will bring enlarged perceptions of truth. ' ' Truth, " 
said St. Clement of Alexandria, "is an ever-flowing river 
into which the streams flow from many sides." In our day 
physical science, history and criticism are pouring countless 
rills and torrents into the broad stream of knowledge; but it 
is philosophy which banks the stream, making it a navigable 
river, not a devastating flood; and it is theology alone which 
makes that river a true river of God. I pray you not to be 
alarmed at those two words, philosophy and theology. In 
the sense in which I use them they mean great things, but 
they are none the less great because they are very common 
things. By philosophy I mean simply the universal tendency 
to compare and classify objects and processes which fall within 
our knowledge. The child who has observed the difl'erence 



18 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTOR Y 

between substances like water or milk and other substances 
like stone or wood has begun to philosophize. When he 
has learned to call the former liquids and the latter solids, 
he has made a large advance in philosophy. When he has 
discovered that all solids can become liquids and that all 
liquids can be changed into a form that is neither solid nor 
liquid, his philosophy has reached the higher point in which 
it finds unsuspected resemblances between things that have 
no external likeness to each other. When he learns that, so 
far as is yet known, the same substances which h^ observes 
around him exist in the remotest star that gems the sky, that 
the same forces which he sees in operation here are operative 
in the furthest regions of the universe, and that there is a 
reciprocal attraction between every speck of star-dust and 
the mightiest sun that rolls through space, he has entered 
the vestibule of that supreme philosophy which discovers 
unity in the sum of all things and perceives a law of relation 
between things which are most widely separated from each 
other. 

Thus philosophy leads up to a conception of the one 
sublime Power in which all things have their source and 
center, the Power which Christians call God. There are 
some who say that philosophy must stop there, that it is 
not concerned with God nor with the nature of God. 
That, however, I think we must deny, both as a matter of 
reason and as a matter of fact: as a matter of reason, be- 
cause it is absurd that philosophy should end with a bare 
discovery of the sublimest object of contemplation that can 
engage the intellect; and as a matter of fact, because, in all 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 19 

the history of philosophy, from its crudest beginnings to its 
loftiest outreach, whenever the conception of Deity has en- 
tered, it has been a fresh beginning, and not an end, of 
philosophical speculation. I cannot admit, therefore, that 
theology and philosophy are different things, and that phi- 
losophy must end where theology begins. They are differ- 
ent but inseparable parts of one and the same intellectual 
process. There was never yet a theology without a philos- 
ophy of the universe, either true or false, nor a philosophy 
of the universe — not even agnosticism — without a theology, 
positive or negative; nor was there ever a time when the in- 
teraction of these two did not prove their intimate connec- 
tion with each other. In short, a rational theology is the 
crown and summit of philosophy. 

Because of the intimate relation between philosophy and 
theology it is evident that neither of the two can remain 
stagnant. Certainly philosophy cannot; for philosophy 
seeks to co-ordinate all the facts which are included in the 
sum of human knowledge, and as the sum of human 
knowledge is always increasing, so the horizon of philoso- 
phy is ever receding ; its standpoint is constantly shifting, 
and from time to time some new discovery or some more 
accurate observation requires its earlier conclusions to give 
place to larger and truer generalizations. In any such 
case it may chance, as it has already chanced in many, 
that theological beliefs will be called in question. Then 
what is called '' a conflict of science and religion" 
may be expected to take place, with some superfluous heat 
on both sides, but invariably with profit to religion, either 



20 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

by confirming what is true and permanent, or by eliminating 
what is temporary and erroneous, in theology. 

When I was a boy, what is called the carpenter theory of 
creation was generally prevalent in popular theology. It 
was the deistical theory. It was not entitled to be called 
the Christian theory, since it completely overlooked and ig- 
nored the profoundest truth of Christian theology; but it 
was extensively held by Christians, as it still is; and, in its 
Christian form, one of its subordinate details was an asser- 
tion that this earth and the universe of which it is so small 
a part were created only six thousand years ago, and in the 
space of six ordinary days of twenty-four hours each. Even 
in my boyhood it was considered to be infidelity to deny or 
doubt that statement. Geological investigations have proved 
it to be wholly untrue, and biological investigations, fol- 
lowing and significantly coloring the geological, have not 
only proved the inconceivable antiquity of the universe, but 
that it is a growing and evolving universe, in which creation 
is still continuously proceeding. I must not now dwell on 
the theological consequences which this new and nobler 
conception of the universe suggests; but even here I may 
allow myself to say that the carpenter theory, with its six 
days and its six thousand years, and its conception of God 
as a contriving and creating Being, altogether external to 
the universe, is well lost if it is followed by a revival of the 
older, nobler and more truly Christian theology of a living 
God, inhabiting eternity, working through eternity, eter- 
nally creating, and eternally abiding immanent in the uni- 
verse of which He is Himself the Life, the Reason and 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY, 21 

the Substance. The carpenter theory is vaHd to a certain 
point against the atheist; but it asserts only a contriving, 
constructing, and controlUng God; and it is no loss to part 
with such a theory if we regain the neglected and half-for- 
gotten Christian theology of the Nicene Creed. 

In the end — and the end comes soon — such a loss is 
great gain ; but it is always painful. When some cher- 
ished belief with which our whole religious life seems to be 
bound up is called into question and assailed with energy, 
all that is loyal and devout in us is roused to resist the en- 
emy. Some are able to resist successfully, and to rest 
throughout their lives in the traditional beliefs and theories 
of their childhood. Theirs is the happiest lot ; but it is not 
the lot of all. As the Apostle Thomas was permitted, ''for 
the greater confirmation of the faith," to be doubtful con- 
cerning our Saviour's resurrection, so, in later ages of the 
world, God suffers others of His children, for the quicken- 
ing, or enlarging, or purifying of their faith, to fall into bit- 
ter doubts of things they have believed. Happy indeed are 
they who, in the midst of doubt, can still preserve the 
spirit of faith, neither wilfully refusing any new light of rev- 
elation that may be vouchsafed them, nor impatiently mis- 
taking transitory views for ultimate convictions and conclu- 
sions, but remembering always that "whatsoever doth 
make manifest is light," and ''cometh down from the Fa- 
ther of Lights," the God of Truth. 

When scepticism is merely superficial, that is, when it is 
d fashion of conceit and a pretence of vanity, it is not re- 
spectable — it is a silly sham. When its root is in the moral 



22 MEMORIAL AXD IXTRODUCTORY. 



nature, and men "' love darkness rather than light, because 
their deeds are evil," such scepticism is both pitiable and 
abominable. Not such, however, is the genuine doubt of 
a sincerely truthful and religious soul. Doubt of that sort 
desen'es respect because of its sincerity, and sympathy be- 
cause it is a sorely painful trial. In the true sense of the 
word, it is a great temptation. Nevertheless, like many 
other temptations, it is ine\-itable. To many moral, so- 
cial and intellectual reconstructions it is an indispensable 
preliminar}-. The saints and prophets are called to it 
Many a crood man must have suffered from it before the 
Book of Job could have been written. Xor ought we to 
forget that before the Son of God was suffered to enter 
on His ministr}-, He was driven of the Spirit into the wil- 
derness to be tempted with insinuations of doubt There- 
fore, when doubt is not courted presumptuously, but 
comes to any man providentially, he ought to remem- 
ber that, in human life and growth, times of temptation, 
weakness, ignorance and helplessness have their place and 
purpose as well as times of strength, wisdom and service. 
Honest doubt concerning religion ought to be encoun- 
tered with calmness. It is not a sin; but it is a grievous sin 
to treat it dishonestly. If doubt is sent to us: it raises 
some question to which God intends us to find, or help to 
find, an answer, and a true one. A man has no more 
right to delude himself, or to juggle with his own reason, 
in answering such a question than he has to deceive his 
neighbor. There is a sin of false assent as well as a sin of 
wilful unbelief A Christian apologist ought to maintain 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 23 



the truth by no argument which he himself does not believe 
to be sound and true. It would be unworthy of himself and 
his cause to refuse to see or admit a truth which seems to 
tell against him. It is his duty to endeavor to appreciate 
the full force of his opponent's arguments; and unless he 
does so, it is certain that he will never satisfactorily answer 
them. Now, I think we must admit that, in dealing with 
one's own doubts, one ought to be as candid and veracious 
as in dealing with another's. It often happens that doubts 
which, for a little while, fill one with uneasiness, pass im- 
perceptibly away, and are felt no more. In that case they 
are by no means to be pursued, and captured, and brought 
back. But serious doubts ought to be seriously and vera- 
ciously met. If they are simply crushed out or choked 
down, they are not destroyed, and the homage we may 
then pay to religion, with unfaith hidden in the heart, is 
not altogether unlike the homage of him who betrayed the 
Son of Man with a kiss ! 

No, doubts, when they are real, must be dealt with, as 
other realities are dealt with, that is, honestly, fairly, vera- 
ciously. But all doubts are by no means equally reason- 
able or of equal importance. Mere puzzles, for example, 
are not doubts. If two men are a mile apart, and the 
one follows the other, walking twice as fast as he, you may 
puzzle the tyro in arithmetic by telling him that since the 
distance between them is first one mile, then one half, one 
quarter, one eighth of a mile, and so on, the second 
walker must forever be some fraction of a mile behind the 
first; but not even the tyro in arithmetic will have the least 



24 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

doubt that when the more rapid walker has walked two 
miles, he will be side by side with the slower, who will 
then have walked one. The puzzle in arithmetic involves 
no real doubt of the fact; and yet there are very many such 
puzzles in religion which serious people honestly mistake 
for grounds of reasonable doubt. 

Neither does our inability to prove a fact or a proposi- 
tion necessarily require us to doubt the reality of the fact, 
or the truth of the proposition. We shall all go to bed to- 
night with a firm conviction that the sun will rise to-mor- 
row morning; but until it happens, not one of us can prove it 
And then, to use the same illustration in another way, not 
one of us believes that the sun will rise at all. We all of us 
believe — most of us would say we know — that it is our own 
side of the earth which will rise till the sun's rays reach it; 
and yet I suspect that to some of us who are quite sure of 
the truth of that proposition, the demonstration of it might 
not be altogether easy. 

Again, it is not rational to abandon the reality of a fact 
merely because we do not know all about it, or the sub- 
stantial truth of a proposition merely because it is imper- 
fectly enunciated. You remem.ber Milton's beautiful apos- 
trophe to Light ? 

" Hail, holy light ! Offspring of heaven, first born ! " 

I suppose there is nothing of which IMilton felt more 
certain than the objective existence of light as a real thing, 
clothing the universe with visible splendor, and tinting it 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 25 

with hues of infinite variety of glory. Yet, in our day, 
nothing is more certain than this, that outside of the eye 
of man, or other eyes which are like the eye of man, there 
is neither light nor color. There is something in nature 
which reveals its presence to our human senses, now in the 
form of light, and then as heat, and again in motion. 
What that something is we do not know, perhaps we never 
shall know; but we do not doabt that it exists nor that it 
appears in what we call light, heat and motion. When it 
produces in the ether certain wavelets or vibrations of in- 
conceivable rapidity, and when those vibrations are re- 
flected from material objects to the retina of the eye, the 
optic nerve is unable to perceive the wavelets or vibrations 
as they really are. The imperfect sensation which they 
produce in it is light, while that which produces the sensa- 
tion is not light, but an unimaginably swift vibration of the 
ether, which our eyes are too dull to perceive. Again, 
when those vibrations are '■eflected on the retina from 
snow, for example, they are reflected, if I may say so, in 
their perfect tone, and then we say that the snow is white. 
In Southern seas, some of the light vibrations, falling on 
the surface of the ocean, are absorbed, and those that are 
reflected have a tone, which the eye perceives as blue. In 
like manner, by reason of various absorptions and reflec- 
tions as from a plate of beaten gold or from the bosom of 
the rose, we have other tones which the eye perceives as 
yellow or red. But there is neither light nor color any- 
where, only swift vibrations of the ether, till they reach the 
eye. Then there is light and color; but the light and the 



26 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

color are in the eye and not beyond it, since they are only 
the eye's sensation of a form of motion which is too swift 
to be perceived as motion. What shall we say, then ? 
That there is no such thing as light ? Or that it is only an 
illusion of the senses ? Or that since our visual percep- 
tions are partial and erroneous, therefore they are utterly 
fallacious and untrustworthy ? Surely not. Altogether 
subjective as it is, "truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant 
thing it is to behold the sun ; " and the sweetness of the 
light and the joy of vision are realities ; vision, imperfect 
as it is, is a reality; the eye, though it cannot follow the 
rapidity of light-vibrations, is a reality; the light sensation 
of the eye, imperfect and erroneous as it is, is a reality; 
imperfect as it is, it enables us to perceive at least the exist- 
ence and certain variations of the reality by which it is 
produced; and imperfect as it is, it does enable us to per- 
ceive a whole infinitude of other realities and to know 
somewhat of the mode of their existence. None of us 
doubts, and none of us is so constituted as to be able really 
to doubt, any of these realities, notwithstanding the fact 
that we are learning day by day to understand more and 
more clearly that the reality of none of them is what it 
seems to us. Before one can have learned that ''things are 
not what they seem" he must first have learned that 
''things are," and he must also have begun to learn some- 
thing of what they are. 

Again, in religion, as in everything else, we must be con- 
tent to "know in part." 

All knowledge is partial. Scientific knowledge, as we 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 27 

call it, is partial knowledge, and not generically different 
from unscientific practical knowledge. A child who plucks 
a violet by the wayside has as real and trustworthy a knowl- 
edge of the flower's existence and of many things concern- 
ing it as the botanist who also knows its organic structure, 
or the chemist who has analyzed its chemical constituents ; 
but none of the three knows anything whatever of the in- 
scrutable somewhat which determines that the growth of 
the tiny flower shall be that of a violet, and not that of a 
lily or a live-oak. True science pretends to nothing more 
than partial knowledge. It confesses that its means of ob- 
servation are imperfect, that it is able to investigate nothing 
more than phenomena, that its interpretations of the sig- 
nificance of phenomena are often erroneous, that its most 
probable hypotheses are not infallibly true. Nay, it ad- 
mits its terminology to be very largely a terminology of 
ignorance. It speaks of "tim«," but does not know 
whether time is a reality or merely an imperfectly conceived 
mode of relation. It speaks of "space," without knowing 
what space is ; of " force, " but it cannot tell what force is ; 
of "matter," while it doubts what matter is, and whether it 
is ; of " cause and efl"ect " as if they were inseparably con- 
nected, and yet it cannot tell what the connection is. Yet 
science does not therefore conclude that a rational concep- 
tion of the course and order of the universe is impossible. 
It is entitled to the name of science for the very reason 
that, in spite of the partial and fragmentary character of 
human knowledge, and in spite of the imperfect terminol- 
ogy it is obliged to use — terminology which, at every step, 



28 MEMORIAL AND INTR OD UC TOR V. 

is a confession of ignorance — it is able to present a rational 
and intelligible view of the operation of nature as a system 
of sublime and all-pervading order. More than this is not 
to be asked or expected in religion. Religion does not 
pretend to teach all things, nor to explain all things, nor 
to make known the innermost reality of anything in heaven 
or earth. If it recognizes power where physical science 
recognizes only force ; if it recognizes reason where science 
recognizes order ; if it recognizes life where science recog- 
nizes growth ; if it considers causes and effects beyond the 
present evolution of the cosmos, and affirms that in "the 
backward and abysm of time" *'the things which are 
seen" can have been made neither by nor of the "things 
which do appear ; " if it offers an hypothesis explanatory of 
the living, growing universe in which we live — an hypothe- 
sis which no fact known to science contradicts, which con- 
tradicts no rational hypothesis of science, and which bridges 
every gap in the continuity of nature for which no merely 
scientific hypothesis accounts ; — still it does not profess to 
teach all things, nor is it to be lightly disregarded because, 
like physical science, it knows only "in part" and must 
therefore "prophesy in part. " All that is asked for Christian 
Theology is that it be treated precisely as scientific philoso- 
phy is treated, and that it be admitted or rejected as a rational 
system of belief, on precisely the same grounds as the 
theory of evolution, let us say, is accepted or rejected. 
Only, let it be judged by what it is, and not by what it is 
not; by what it has to say and not by what it does not 
pretend to say. 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 29 

By a somewhat devious path, perhaps, we have now 
reached a point at which I may tell the modest part which 
I have set before myself in this preliminary and merely 
introductory course of lectures. My first object will be 
to clear the way for those who are to follow, by showing 
"what is included, and what is not included, in the intellect- 
ual system of ''Christianity." I believe that no greater 
service can be done in these times to the cause of Christ 
than to make a clear and just distinction between those arti- 
cles of faith which are essential to the Christian religion, 
and that vast mass of shifting opinions, true and false, 
which Christian people have believed, or disbelieved, or 
forgotten, without impairment or improvement of their 
Christianity. It is because so many of those transitory and 
provisional opinions have been falsely represented as essen- 
tial parts of Christianity that, from time to time, when some 
one or other of them has come to be discredited, Chris- 
tianity itself has been thought to be disproved. It is sad 
sometimes to read an eloquent lecture against the Christian 
faith, knowing that the lecturer has succeeded in persuading 
his hearers that Christianity is not true, and then, on ana- 
lyzing the arguments, to find that not one single fact or 
doctrine of the Christian faith has been so much as men- 
tioned in the whole discourse — nothing but crude opinions 
of which the great body of Christians in all the ages never 
so much as heard ! That is one part of the price which 
Christians pay for their unholy and unchristian divisions. 
From the days of the apostles until now, nine tenths of the 
divisions which have rent and marred the Body of Christ 



30 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 

have resulted from contentions concerning matters of opin- 
ion which had no more to do with Christianity than with 
Buddhism or Mohammedanism. Then, by and by, when 
those opinions have been established in popular opinion as 
necessary parts of Christianity, they fall again into disrepute, 
and then, in popular opinion, Christianity itself falls with 
them. Is there anything in the history of science and re- 
ligion sadder than the story of Hugh Miller? Miller was 
a man of true genius, a true Christian, and a man of science. 
It was his misfortune to have been taught that many things 
were necessary parts of Christianity which had really nothing 
to do with it. Believing those things devoutly, he bent his 
great powers to find illustrations and confirmations of them 
in the course of nature. As he had been taught that human 
nature was depraved at its source by the fall of Adam, he 
was glad, rather than sorry, to believe that in the old red 
sandstone there are many proofs of a physical fall in other 
races of living creatures. It seemed to him, and he main- 
tained, that successive species were created perfect, only to 
fall into subsequent depravation from the type in which God 
had originally made them. Thus, to his distorted vision, 
it seemed that animated nature had been nothing else than 
one long series of creative failures. One would think that 
so preposterous a view must have repelled belief, but un- 
happily it was not so. On the contrary, when his own in- 
vestigations proved his theory to be wrong, when he began 
to see that in nature every fall had been a fall forwards or 
upwards, when it became evident to him that his Bible was 
useless as a scientific text-book, his whole faith failed, his 



MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 31 



train reeled, and he died by his own hand. Believe me, 
there are many others whose faith has reeled and failed be- 
cause they have been forced to reject alleged truths which 
they supposed to be essential to the Christian faith. If, 
then, I shall be so fortunate as to be able to discriminate 
the verities of Christianity from opinions or beliefs, whether 
true or false, which have been confounded with that faith 
or have been erroneously represented as essential parts of 
it, I shall have done some service to the Christian religion, 
by preventing some of those unhappy misconceptions of it 
which so often lead to loss of faith. 

Even in respect of the essential articles of Christianity I 
shall hope to point out a distinction which may be worthy 
of your careful consideration. It is usually thought that 
the essential doctrines of Christianity are many, that they are 
all propounded in the same dogmatic way, and that they are 
all intended to be held in the same way. Now, nothing 
could be further from the truth. The dogmas of the 
Christian Faith are few; and they are not all set forth, nor 
are they all intended to be held, in the same way. I should 
be afraid at this time to tell you how few the pure dogmas 
of Christianity are; but I am not afraid to say that some of 
the Christian dogmas are symbolical or parabolical, not 
pure dogmas at all, but illustrative and approximative state- 
ments of divine truths which human language cannot per- 
fectly express, because imperfect human reason cannot 
perfectly comprehend them. If I can thus help you to see 
in Christian Creeds not fetters of the intellect and shackles 
of the reason but helpful aids to rational and hopeful faith, 



32 MEMORIAL AND INTRODUCTORY 

I shall have done something to prepare the way for other and 
more competent apologists. 

In the direct discussion of the Christian Evidences I 
shall touch but two points, and I shall touch them rather by 
way of illustrating a line of argument which I believe to 
have been too much neglected than for any more ambitious 
purpose. In my opinion Christian apologists have held 
themselves too much on the defensive. I believe they might 
find advantage in what I should call the method of apprecia- 
tive attack. For instance, I shall endeavor to show in the 
fifth lecture that if we should admit all the facts which are 
alleged, and adopt the method of argument which is used 
by agnostic evolutionists like Mr. Spencer, the result would 
bring us, not to agnosticism, but rather to the profound and 
Christian theism of the Nicene Creed; and in the first part 
of the sixth lecture, I shall endeavor in like manner to show- 
that if we should admit the largest conclusions of the most 
destructive criticism of the Holy Scriptures that has any 
credit among men of recognized critical authority, the 
essentials of the Christian Faith would nevertheless remain 
unmoved and unscathed. It is very possible that I may not 
succeed in showing you these things as clearly as I believe 
I see them; but even so, my failure may perhaps suggest a 
line of argument which some other and abler lecturer may 
follow more successfully than I. 



LECTURE II. 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY P 



LECTURE II. 

WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY TO THE 
COUNCIL OF NICiEA. 

When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come. He shall guide you into all 
truth. — John xvi. 13. 

Ye shall be witnesses unto Me .... unto the uttermost parts 
of the earth. — Acts i. 8. 

The Christ does not come into the world as the Founder of a religion. 

— MULFORD. 

Every idea must have a visible unfolding; a habitation is necessary 
to a principle; every dogma must have a temple. — Hugo. 

In its earliest usage, therefore, catholic means universal as opposed to 
individual, particular. The Church throughout the world is called 
catholic, just as the resurrection of all mankind is called catholic. In 
its later sense, as a fixed attribute, it implies orthodoxy as opposed to 
heresy, conformity as opposed to dissent. Thus, to the primary idea 
of extension are superadded also the ideas of doctrine and unity. But 
this later sense grows out of the earlier. The truth was the same every- 
where, quod se??iper, quod ubigue, quod ab omnibus. The heresies were 
partial, scattered, localized. — Lightfoot. 

The life of the Spirit has its witness to the world in the Church. 

The Church is the company of all faithful people. 

The Church has an organic unity and life. 

The Church is the witness to the life of the Spirit in humanity. It is 
not the source of the life of the Spirit, but the witness of it. The Spirit 
is not the gift of the Church, but the Church of the Spirit. The words 
of faith — which cannot be transposed — are, " I believe in the Holy 
Ghost; in the Holy Catholic Church," — Mulford. 

35 



36 ^'^A T IS CHRISTIANITY? 

The funciion of the Church with regard to truth is primarily to bear 
witness to that which has been revealed. It does not primarily reveal; 
it tells of the truths which have been embodied in the historic life of 
Jesus Christ or explained m His teaching. One is its Teacher; one is 
its Master, even Christ. It holds a faith once delivered to the Saints. 
Hence, from the first, there grew up some authoritative formula, in 
which we can see the germ of the later creeds, which each Christian 
missionary would teach his converts. The Church is thus primarily a 
witness; the strength of its authority lies in the many sides from which 
the witness comes, but the exigencies of controversy, and indeed of 
thought even apart from controversy, rendered necessary another func- 
tion in respect to truth. The Church was compelled to formulate, to 

express its witness in relation to the difficulties of the time 

Its first instinct is, as the first instinct of friendship would be, to reseni 
intellectual analysis and dogmatic definition. But as the need of telling' 
others about a friend, or defending him against slander, would compel 
us to analyze his qualities and define his attractiveness, so it was with 
the Church's relation to the Lord. — Rev. W. Lock, M.A. 

Before we can consider the Evidences of Christianity 
with profit, or even with intelligence, it is necessary to 
understand what the Christian religion is. Only then can 
we know whether its evidences are worth considering, and, 
if so, what they ought to be. 

I shall not weary you with discussions of the derivation 
and significance of the word religion. Religion is a fact in 
human experience, and it is with the fact of religion that 
we are now concerned. Moreover, religion is an universal 
fact in every stage of normal human development. It is 
said, indeed, that on the face of all the earth there are a 
few obscure tribes which are wholly destitute of religion. 
I apprehend, however, that this assertion means only that, 
in those tribes, the presence of religious sentiments or ideas 
has not been ascertained ; and further investigation might 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 37 

conceivably discover unsuspected evidences of a supersti- 
tious origin, that is to say, of a base religious origin, of 
some of the most ordinary customs of those degraded peo- 
ple. It is needless, however, to insist on this point. It is 
sufficiently well expressed by Hume, who says: "Look 
out for a people entirely destitute of religion ; if you find 
them at all, be assured that they are but a few degrees re- 
moved from brutes." 

Religion is pre-eminently a social fact. I do not at all 
mean that it is not a personal affair of the individual. 
Every religion affects and controls the individual ; it often 
does so most effectually when the individual himself is 
utterly unconscious of its influence ; and the loftier a re- 
ligion is, the more intensely personal are the sentiments of 
duty and devotion with which it inspires its individual ad- 
herents. Yet history testifies that no religion has ever been 
known to flourish except as a family, or tribal, or national, 
or otherwise social institution. No religion was ever yet 
invented or originated by an individual. Every religion 
has been a social growth. Men who are called founders of 
historical religions have never been more than reformers of 
existing religions — prophets of truths which other men have 
been ready to accept because those truths were already 
latent in the religious consciousness of the time. The 
Christian religion itself did not originate as a novelty, but 
as the fulfilment of an earlier religion ; and the Christian 
religion claims to be the most pre-eminently social of all 
religions. At the very outset it was sent to **all nations"; 
it was intended to unite mankind in one universal brother- 



38 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 



hood ; and although the Christian Church has been rent by 
human folly and perversity into innumerable warring sects, 
societies and Churches, every one of these, even in its un- 
christian isolation, bears unconscious testimony to the es- 
sentially social character of the religion of Christ. They 
avow their allegiance to *'one Master." They profess to 
hold that all true Christians are members of "one Body," 
that they are ''members one of another," and that, in the 
obedience of ''one Lord," in the holding of "one faith," 
and in the enjoyment of "one hope," they have all received 
the sacramental pledge of "one baptism." All Christians 
believe themselves to be in vital spiritual union with one 
and the same Divine Head, and consequently not only with 
other members of their own Church or sect, but with all 
true Christians, in this world or beyond it, who have ever 
lived. Thus, in the midst of schism and all its evils, the 
universal Christian conscience testifies that every schism is 
a crime against the social constitution of the Church of 
Christ. 

In all religions which are not merely superstitions, and 
certainly in Christianity, we find these three things : doc- 
trine, worship and duty. Every religion acknowledges 
some Object (or objects) of supreme veneration, requires 
or recommends some form of worship to be addressed to 
that Object, and sets forth some code of ethics which it 
declares to be religiously obligatory. Here again, excep- 
tions prove the rule. Buddhism, for example, has neither 
God nor gods ; but that defect is confessed and supplied 
by the superstitious worship of beings who are not gods. 



fVHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 39 



Shintoism has no code of ethics ; but its adherents supply 
that lack by adopting the ethics of Confucius. Mystics of 
all religions, whenever they have professed to abandon 
external rites of worship, have invariably fallen into formal- 
ism. 

We may assume, then, that these three parts are to be 
found in all religions ; but we must not expect them to be 
equally balanced in all religions, nor equally prominent at 
all times and in all places in the same religion. At one 
time or in a given place we may find that the doctrinal or 
dogmatic predominates ; in another, the ritual and liturgi- 
cal ; very seldom the ethical ; and when the ethical does 
apparently predominate, it is often because matters of exter- 
nal observance have been elevated into indispensable duties. 
In Christianity, most assuredly, there are these three parts : 
doctrine, worship and a code of morals ; no one of the 
three can be excluded from it. Again and again the 
Founder of Christianity said, "Believe!" There must, 
therefore, be something in Christianity which it is necessary 
to believe. He said, ** After this manner pray ye" ; '* Do 
this in remembrance of Me " ; *' Make disciples of all na- 
tions, and baptize them." Thus it is evident that prayer 
and sacraments are original and indispensable parts of 
Christianity. But again, nearly all of our Lord's personal 
teaching was ethical ; and, therefore, when He commanded 
His Apostles to teach their converts '' all things whatsoever 
I have commanded you," we must infer that the ethical 
teaching of their Master was to be the most prominent part 
of His religion. 



4:0 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

All this is plain enough; but if we now ask representa- 
tives of Christianity to tell us what Christianity is, we may 
expect to hear very different answers. Their doctrines are 
different; one devoutly believes what another vehemently 
denies. Their worship is different ; one regards as obliga- 
tory v.hat another condemns as superstitious. Only in 
morals do they all, or nearly all, agree; but in morals, too, 
they differ when external observances are elevated to the 
place of moral obligations. In this present age, then, is it 
possible to discover what essential Christianity is ? Why 
should it not be possible } Students of physical science 
encounter many such apparent impossibilities, but they re- 
fuse to confess the impossibility. In the case of the do- 
mestic pigeon, for example, which human curiosity and 
caprice have bred into such extraordinary varieties, the 
naturalist declares that under every artificial variation the 
original type of the common ancestry remains constant. 
He affirms that if artificial conditions and interferences 
were removed, the domestic varieties would revert to that 
common and original type. He has no hesitation in pro- 
nouncing a wood dove, a carrier pigeon and a pouter 
pigeon to be of the same species, nor does he doubt that 
the wood dove is nearest to the original type of the species, 
while the carrier has been produced by the exceptional 
development of an original faculty, and the pouter by the 
persistent development of an individual deformity. Now, 
if we should apply the historic method to the questions 
before us, since we know that all the existing variations of 
Christianity have been derived from one and the same orig- 



VVHA T IS CHRISTIANITY ? 4J_ 

inal, we might surely expect to find the essentials of 
Christianity constant, though often obscured, in each and 
all of them. In some we should discover evidences of 
orderly and normal development, and again in others 
cultivated eccentricities and deformities. We might expect 
to find reason to believe that if artificial conditions and in- 
terferences were removed, if individual, local and sectarian 
pretensions were renounced, and if the normal social spirit 
of Christianity were once more to be brought into free and 
universal operation, the mere elimination of exceptional 
idiosyncrasies would bring the universal and essential 
elements of Christ's religion so clearly into evidence that 
they could not be mistaken. Unfortunately that decisive 
experiment cannot be made; and yet I believe that, by a 
calm and rational application of the historic method, we 
can nevertheless ascertain the essentials of that world-wide 
Christianity which Christ came to establish, and which all 
Churches, sects and denominations, calling themselves 
Christian, profess to represent. In this investigation we 
must treat our subject as we would treat any other subject 
of historical interest; and I venture to believe that in the 
degree to which we shall honestly and veraciously do so, to 
that degree will our conclusions be rationally and religious- 
ly satisfactory. Let us, then, for the moment, lay aside all 
personal prepossessions. Let us forget, if possible, the 
shibboleths* of modern denominational Christianity. Let 
us interrogate the undivided Church of Christ. Let us in- 
quire of it what original Christianity was, and how it grew 
and what it became. If it gives an answer to our queries. 



4-9 WHA T IS CHRISTIANITY ? 



that answer will tell us what essential Christianity is and 
what modern Christianity ought to be. 

Let me again remind you that the first fact which strikes 
one in the early history of Christianity is its pre-eminently 
social character, in short, the unity of the Christian Church. 
Next to faith in Christ, I should say that the sense of 
brotherhood between all who held that faith was the most 
striking characteristic of the first disciples. No man 
among them seemed to think that anything he had was 
really his own so long as any other brother was in need. 
In matters temporal, as in matters spiritual, they were all 
of one heart and of one mind. Yet, when we examine into 
details, we find that their hopes and sympathies were very 
much narrower at first than one would expect from the 
teaching of their Master. He had told His apostles that 
they were to "go into all the world," to " preach the gos- 
pel to every creature," to ''make disciples of all nations," 
and to "baptize all nations "in His Name. Yet, for seven 
years at least, and possibly for eleven years, after His as- 
cension, the disciples seem never to have thought of the 
plain meaning of those commands. They remained, as 
He had bid them remain, at Jerusalem, teaching and 
preaching to the Jews of the Dispersion who thronged 
yearly to the Holy City, and so completely were they 
absorbed in that work that they do not seem so much as to 
have thought of the greater work to which* they were 
ordained. True, some of them did follow the example of 
Jesus by preaching the Gospel to the circumcised Samari- 
tans who professed allegiance to the law of Moses, and 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 43 

there is one solitary instance of the baptism of an Ethio- 
pian who may very likely have been an Israelite by blood. 
But it was not for seven years, nor then except as the result 
of a special revelation, that the Apostles and the Apostolic 
Church were brought to understand that *'now to the 
Gentiles also had God granted repentance unto life." 
When Peter acted on that belief, his conduct was at first 
severely blamed. '*The Apostles and brethren," that is, 
the Christian community, came together to hear his ac- 
count of it, and it was only by the acquiescence of the 
Church that the matter was settled. Thenceforth and for- 
ever it was recognized as an elementary principle of Chris- 
tianity that it is an universal religion for *' all the world," 
and that no man may be excluded from the Christian 
Society on account of race distinctions. 

It was probably three years later that another most im- 
portant matter was settled in precisely the same way. It 
was now understood that Gentiles were to be received into 
the Church; but another point remained to be decided. It 
is possible, and it seems to be probable, that Cornelius, af- 
ter his baptism, voluntarily submitted to the obligations 
of the Mosaic law; and when the Gospel came to be 
preached at Antioch in Syria, some of the Jewish Christians 
insisted that unless the Gentile converts were circumcised 
and kept the law of Moses, they could not be saved. This 
was a vital question. On its right decision would depend 
the very character of Christianity as a religion. If the na- 
tional law of Moses was obligatory on the Christian Gen- 
tiles, or, in other words, if a Gentile must become a Jew in 



44 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

order to become a Christian, then Christianity was merely a 
sect of Judaism, like Phariseeism or Sadduceeism, and not 
an universal religion for ''all nations." 

It is interesting to see how this great matter was settled. 
In the first place, it was not settled by the judgment or 
opinion of individuals. Personal opinion and personal feel- 
ing seem to have run high; for there was " no small dis- 
sension and disputation," which not even the authority of 
Paul and Barnabas availed to terminate. Neither, in the 
next place, was it settled by local authority. The sacred 
story shows that the Church in Antioch was heartily agreed 
with Barnabas and Paul; but this was a matter which con- 
cerned the whole Christian Community, and therefore it was 
loyally submitted to the united judgment of the Apostles, 
Elders and Brethren at Jerusalem, including the immediate 
followers of Christ, and in all probability members of all 
the Christian Churches. So, "the Apostles, Elders and 
Brethren came together (with the representatives sent from 
Antioch) for to consider of this matter; " and again we find 
that no merely personal or individual judgment was deci- 
sive. There was "much disputing" to begin with; but 
nothing came of it. Then St. Peter reminded them of the 
adjudicated case of Cornelius, and insisted that it covered 
the case before them. This was a strong point; and if Cor- 
nelius had not conformed to the Mosaic law, it was a de- 
cisive point. But it does not seem to have settled the ques- 
tion at issue, though it secured a quiet hearing to Barnabas 
and Paul while they told the signs of divine approval which 
had accompanied their work at Antioch. Then St. James 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 45 

the Just, who seems to have presided in the council as 
Bishop of Jerusalem, summed up the case and declared his 
judgment against requiring Gentile Christians to conform to 
Judaism. It was only after all these deliberations that *'it 
pleased the Apostles and Elders, with the whole Church," 
to send messengers to Antioch with a letter in which they 
said that the judgment of St. James had "seemed good to 
the Holy Ghost and to them." That judgment was ac- 
cepted and obeyed at Antioch and in all Christian Churches 
everywhere; and so it became, or rather, it was admitted to 
be, a fundamental article of the constitution of organized 
Christianity. 

This rational and orderly way of settling matters of com- 
mon concern by common consent was the way of wisdom, 
peace and unity in the infant Church. It contained some- 
thing more than the germ principle of constitutional parlia- 
mentary government; but it would have been inconsistent 
with the principle of federative government, which is essen- 
tial to a world-wide community, if it had interfered with 
the free control of local affairs by local authorities. That the 
Christian Commonwealth from the very first admitted and 
acted on both of these essential principles is the fact which 
I shall next endeavor to show. 

It is often said that the Apostolic Church had no Creed, 
no Bible and no Liturgy, and it is sometimes confidently 
assumed that it was a great advantage to the Apostolic 
Church that it had none of these three things. Well, the 
statement is not true. The Apostolic Church had a Creed, 
it had a Bible and it had a Liturgy. It is perfectly true that 



46 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY i 



the Creed, the Bible and the Liturgy of the Apostolic 
Church were all in a state of growth; and no doubt, the 
Divine law of growth, which brings first the blade, then 
the ear, and after these the full corn in the ear, has its ad- 
vantages at every stage, if we could only know what they 
are. It is all for good that an unconscious babyhood pre- 
cedes the prattling infancy which insensibly passes into 
youth and grows into perfect maturity of human life ; yet it 
is not in the beginnings but in the completion of growth 
that perfection is reached. So, in the infant Church of 
the Apostolic age, there is a lesson to be learned in the art 
of planting infant Churches, which it would be well for the 
Church and the world if missionaries to the heathen 
studied somewhat more closely than they do; but unless 
it is desirable for men or Churches to remain forever in a 
state of infancy, we must study not only what the infant 
Church was, but how it grew, and what, under God's 
promised guidance, it became. In respect of the three 
matters mentioned it is not difficult to do so. 

The Church of the Apostles had certainly a Creed. Un- 
less Baptism meant nothing definite, the baptized must 
have confessed their faith in the Father, and in the Son, and 
in the Holy Ghost, into whose Name they were baptized by 
Christ's command. That brief formula is the essential sub- 
stance of all true Christian Creeds. In the unchangeable 
formula of Holy Baptism, says Dorner, " the treasures of 
immediate faith are gathered up into a sentence, though not 
yet formulated into a doctrine." This is well said; but the 
doctrine is in the sentence; and to intelligent human beings 



WHA T IS CHRIS TIANITY ? 47 

some brief outline of the meaning of the doctrine must al- 
ways have been indispensable. 

Naturally the teaching of that doctrine would begin with 
some brief account of the life of Him who is the Author and 
Finisher of the Christian Faith ; and I, for one, am deeply 
and unalterably convinced that, long before the date of any 
of the Four Gospels as we now have them, there was a 
shorter elementary gospel which was afterwards made the 
basis of the three synoptic Gospels. I can not here enter 
fully into the argument for this belief; permit me, however, 
to give it in very brief outline. 

In the first place, nothing could be more natural than that 
the numerous converts from all parts of the civilized world 
who were baptized at Jerusalem in the early days of the 
Church should desire to carry with them to their homes 
some brief authentic account of the Divine Life which is 
the essence of the Gospel ; and nothing could be more nat- 
ural than that the Disciples who were the companions and 
chosen witnesses of that Life, should be willing to gratify 
that desire. The evidence that this was done seems to me 
to be overwhelming. The student of Shakspeare finds lit- 
tle difficulty in tracing the origin of his plays in tales and 
histories which are yet extant. Now, if it were to be found 
that Shakspeare and two other poets continually used the 
same language, word for word, and sometimes line for 
line, or even paragraph for paragraph, only one of two in- 
ferences would be possible : Either two of them must 
have copied from the third ; or else all three must have 
copied from some other writer. That is precisely the 



48 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

fact to be accounted for in the three synoptic Gospels. To 
such an extent is their language identical that if we strike 
out of each of the three every word and syllable that is not 
contained in both of the other two, there actually remains 
in each an intelligible life of Christ, with all its most re- 
markable incidents. Now, a bare inspection of these three 
Gospels proves that no one of the three is an enlargement 
or abridgement of the other; and an examination of their 
parallel passages shows that in many cases two of the three 
have identical words, phrases and sentences, while the third 
has either no corresponding passage or else tells the story 
in different language, and with some variation of detail. 

What conclusion can we draw from these facts but this, 
that all three of these evangelists had before them an earlier 
and briefer Gospel, which each of them substantially 
adopted, but to which each of them made such additions 
from other authentic sources as were necessary to complete 
it for the purpose he had personally in hand .? No other 
conclusion seems to me to be possible. If it is correct, 
then we may suppose that the synoptic Gospels, as they 
were written, would speedily take the place of the original 
and briefer Gospel, as later editions of any work invariably 
take the place of earlier and less perfect editions; and when, 
after a still longer time, the Churches all the world over 
came to possess all three of the synoptic Gospels, and also 
the later Gospel of St. John, the original elementary Gospel 
would quite naturally pass out of sight. 

It is an assumption, then, and a false assumption, to say 
that there was no Bible in the infant Church. There was 



WHA T IS CHRISTIANITY? 49 

the whole of the Old Testament, and we have now seen 
that, in all probability, there was at least a brief Gospel of 
undoubted apostolical authority not long after the day of 
Pentecost. As the years passed, the Four canonical Gos- 
pels were composed or compiled, the Epistles were written, 
and at last the Revelation of St. John completed the New 
Testament as we now have it. But here another fact ap- 
pears, which must not be overlooked. There were two 
editions of the Old Testament, the original Hebrew and the 
Septuagint Greek, and these two were by no means identi- 
cal, since they differed in many particulars, and the Septu- 
agint contained whole Books which were lacking in the 
Hebrew Bible. Then, in the formation of the New Testa- 
ment, we learn from St. Luke that "many had taken in 
hand " to write Gospels, and some of those Gospels were 
anything but trustworthy. There were epistles, too, which 
are still extant, from the Apostle Barnabas and from St. 
Clement of Rome, which were regarded by many as of 
apostolical authority, and which were long read in public 
worship, while in many Churches the so-called ''Catholic 
Epistles" of James, Peter, John and Jude were not read at 
all. We have therefore to ask how "the canon" of the 
Scriptures, Old and New, was settled in the Christian 
Church. 

In one sense of the word it never has been authoritatively 
settled for the whole Christian Community. But so far as 
it has been settled, it has invariably been settled in one 
way, namely, by common consent. The first list of the 
Books of Scripture which has come down to us was made 



50 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

at the Council of Laodicea in the fourth century. It is 
not the same as any list of canonical Books now accepted 
in any Christian Church. It admits some of the Apocry- 
phal Books of the Old Testament, and it excludes, or 
rather, it does not mention, the Apocalypse. Other later 
lists differ more or less from the Laodicean list and from 
each other, and so they continued to do in different 
Churches, and at different times even in the same Church. 
The Canon of the Church of Rome was not finally settled 
until the Council of Trent, A. D. 1546. The Canon of 
the Church of England was settled in 1553. The Canon 
of the Greek Church continued for many centuries to retain 
two Epistles of St. Clement, and it was not until 1672 that 
a Council at Jerusalem adopted the Canon of the Church 
of Rome. Notwithstanding these differences, and they 
were both numerous and apparently capricious, there never 
was any dissension among Christians on the subject. The 
word ''canonical" shows how the matter was regarded. 
Different Provinces settled for themselves the Books which 
ought to be ''allowed to be read in Churches," and they 
adopted a canon or rule to that effect. No Church ever 
pretended to dictate a canon to another Church on that 
point. No General Council of the whole Christian Church 
ever undertook to dictate a canon of Holy Scriptures to 
local Churches. The old theologians held that "the au- 
thority of Holy Scripture is from God alone," not, as is 
sometimes foolishly said, from the Church; and therefore 
the acceptance of particular Scriptures has always been Jeft 
to the free action of particular Churches, according to the 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 51 



light which they have severally had. The end is a substan- 
tial agreement of all Churches. 

Let us now see how liturgical arrangements grew in the 
Apostolic Church. So long as the temple stood, the Chris- 
tians of Jewish birth continued to observe and join in its 
appointed services, though they did not fail to assemble 
together for Christian worship. The Gentile converts, as 
we have seen, were not required to conform to Jewish us- 
ages; and after the destruction of the temple, Jewish Chris- 
tians also were freed from an obligation which even they 
had long felt to be burdensome. But they were not there- 
fore released, nor did they wish to be released, from the 
duty of public worship; and they were not destitute of a 
seemly ritual. The forms of the synagogue, which had 
been sanctioned by the personal use of Christ Himself, 
were familiar and acceptable to all the Jewish Christians. 
It was the invariable custom of the Apostles, wherever they 
went preaching the Gospel, to deliver their message first of 
all to their brethren after the flesh; and this they usually 
did at the Sabbath services of the synagogues and oratories 
which were to be found in all cities and towns of impor- 
tance. When the Christians were reluctantly compelled, as 
at Corinth, to quit the synagogues and to establish sepa- 
rate congregations of their own, there is no reason to sup- 
pose that they abandoned the edifying order of worship to 
which they were accustomed, or that they had any difficulty 
in adding to it the sacramental worship of their new faith. 
Such, in fact, appears to have been the usual course; and 
experts in liturgies, like the late Dr. Freeman, are able to 



52 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 



trace the origins of the daily services of our EngHsh Book 
of Common Prayer back through the breviaries of the mid- 
dle ages to their fountain head in the Eighteen Prayers of 
the Synagogue. All this, however, was left to take its nat- 
ural course as times and occasions and the edification of 
different communities required. There was no command- 
ment of the Apostles on the subject. 

Even in the celebration of sacraments no nicety of litur- 
gical arrangement was prescribed by the Apostles;, and in 
this, as there was no old order by which to be guided, it is 
not strange that there were instances of gross irregularity. 
In the instructive case of Corinth, for example, it is as cer- 
tain as it is astonishing that, after enjoying the continuous 
personal ministrations of an Apostle for eighteen months, 
the Corinthian Christians still regarded the Lord's Supper 
as a social meal, and that some of them, in celebrating 
what they supposed to be the Lord's Supper, behaved with 
unbrotherly selfishness, and indulged their appetites to 
drunkenness. It was after they had fallen into this enor- 
mous and incredible error that the Apostle wrote to instruct 
them in the nature of the sacrament and the indispensable 
formula required in its celebration. It is probable that he 
subsequently prescribed the order of a fuller Liturgy; for, 
in his epistle, after he had given them the indispensable 
formula of the "canon," he added, " The rest will I set in 
order when I come. " There are not a few interesting evi- 
dences of the existence of noble sacramental Liturgies in 
the Apostolic Church; but there is no evidence that the Lit- 
urgies of all the Apostolic Churches were the same. If we 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 53 



are to judge from later developments, various Liturgical 
types must have begun to appear at a very early period, in 
all of which the indispensable formula was religiously re- 
tained, while subordinate and accessory details were added 
and altered in accordance with the tastes and tendencies of 
local Churches. Nowhere was the essential part omitted or 
mutilated; and nowhere was it supposed that any other 
part was to be prescribed to local Churches by any external 
authority. Thus, in the Primitive Church, the utmost free- 
dom of local action was experimentally proved to secure, 
rather than to endanger, the essentials of a right celebration 
of Christian worship. 

The early Liturgies afford the best imaginable proof of 
the continued purity of doctrine in the Churches of the first 
three centuries; because religious worship always corre- 
sponds to religious belief, and if the belief of the early 
Christians had been depraved during those ages of persecu- 
tion, the change would surely have left its mark on their 
Liturgies. Consequently when we find that the various lit- 
urgies, with whatever difference of local form, remained 
substantially the same in doctrine, we are entitled to infer 
':hat the one faith, which was once delivered to all, had 
been kept by all in its original purity. It is improbable, to 
say the least, that this would have happened if the widely 
separated Churches of India, Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, 
Greece, Northern Africa, Italy, Gaul, and Britain had not 
been at pains to discriminate and emphasize the essential el- 
ements of their common faith. It is therefore intrinsically 
probable that, from the earliest times all Christian Churches 



54 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

must have had brief summaries of the Christian faith which 
we should now call creeds. It is probable, too, that can- 
didates for Baptism would be required to make their pro- 
fession of faith in some satisfactory way before the Church, 
and since most candidates were illiterate persons who could 
not be expected to do so in terms of their own choosing, it 
would be natural that a brief summary should be provided 
for them. 

Such, undoubtedly, is the historical fact. There are some 
reasons for believing that the Apostles themselves set forth 
such summaries. Thus St. Paul bids Timothy '' Hold fast 
the form of sound words which thou hast heard of me," and 
elsewhere he speaks of *'that good thing which was com- 
mitted unto thee." It is reasonable to suppose that "the 
form of sound words " which Timothy had heard from St. 
Paul was the ''good thing" he was exhorted to hold fast; 
and unless it was a liturgy, it is difficult to imagine what it 
could be unless it was a Creed. I am inclined, however, to 
believe that it was a liturgy, or some part of a liturgy; 
because, if it had been a Creed, it would surely have been 
preserved and regarded as an indispensable formula by all 
the Churches to which it was communicated. Now, the 
strange thing is that, for four centuries, while brief creeds 
or confessions of the essentials of Christian faith seem to 
have been in almost or quite universal use in all Churches, 
no particular form was considered essential or immutable. 
Some were longer, and some were shorter. At Carthage, for 
instance, the candidate for Baptism, in answer to the 
question, "Dost thou believe?'' answered simply: "I 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 55 

believe in God the Father, in His Son Christ (and) in the 
Holy Ghost; I believe (in) the forgiveness of sins and eternal 
life through the holy Church. " In Western Churches, the 
baptismal creeds were fuller, and gradually approximated to 
the form which is now called the Apostles' Creed. In 
Oriental Churches, if we may at all trust the so-called 
Apostolical Constitutions, the form of the baptismal creeds 
must have been fuller than at the West, and must more 
nearly have resembled that which is now popularly called 
the Nicene Creed. Here, once more, we find local liberty 
in matters of form together with substantial unity and con- 
sent in all essentials. 

I must now ask you to follow me in an examination of 
one of the most interesting series of events in the history of 
Christianity. By those events it has commonly been sup- 
posed that the former freedom of the Christian Churches was 
notably abridged; but I hope to show you that, on the con- 
trary, it was solemnly confirmed and resolutely protected as 
a constitutional and inalienable right; and, as one result of 
our investigation, I trust that you will clearly see what are 
the genuine doctrinal essentials of the Christian faith. I 
shall have no occasion to make any assertion that will be 
disputed by any competent scholar; and if I am so fortunate 
as to make my statement of the facts sufficiently simple, I 
believe that the inferences and conclusions to be drawn 
from them will require no argument. 

The unity of consent in all matters of importance which 
prevailed throughout the Christian Church of the first three 
centuries was maintained, by the simple and reasonable 



56 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

method of frequent consultation. Whenever any question 
of difficulty arose, the parties immediately interested con- 
ferred together, and if the matter was of general concern, 
they communicated their conclusion to neighboring 
Churches. In cases of peculiar difficulty advice was sought 
from other Churches until a satisfactory solution was 
reached. So universal and so strong was the social bond 
which united the primitive Churches, so intimate was their 
knowledge of each others' affairs, and so closely were the 
decisions of local Churches observed and followed by other 
local Churches, that a fairly complete code of canons had 
come into existence, and had been generally accepted, before 
a single General Council of all the Churches of Christendom 
had ever been practically thought of. When questions of 
faith arose, as they did too often arise, they were always 
decided in the same way. Most of the proposed doctrines 
were mere innovations, which the common sense of all the 
Churches rejected; and in that case the innovators either 
submitted to the common judgment or withdrew from the 
common assembly of the faithful. Sometimes the innovators 
obstinately denied some article of the faith and were there- 
upon expelled from the Church. When differences arose on 
matters of discipline between brethren who were one in faith, 
other Churches were consulted, and the common judgment 
was decisive. Everywhere the rule was the same: a man 
who held the common faith and remained in communion 
with the universal body of the faithful was everywhere 
recognized as a member of the one universal or catholic 
Church; all who departed from the universal faith, who 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 57 



rejected the discipline which the universal judgment 
approved, or who withdrew from the communion of other 
Christians, thereby cut themselves off from the Catholic 
Church. 

At first there were no appointed times nor prescribed dis- 
tricts within which the Bishops of adjacent local Churches 
were expected or required to meet together for consulta- 
tion. Soon, however, these matters of orderly procedure 
were arranged. Two of the oldest canons in existence 
direct that the Bishops of every ''nation" are to have a 
chief of their own order with whom they are to act on all 
occasions, and that their regular meetings for business are 
to be held shortly after Easter and again in the month of 
October every year. For a long time the Roman provinces 
generally coincided with the nations conquered by the 
Roman arms; but when those national provinces were 
divided into smaller provinces, as they frequently were, the 
Church arrangements followed the new order. Thus pro- 
vincial councils gradually took the place of national coun- 
cils; but no Ecumenical or General Council of the whole 
Christian Church was ever proposed, or was ever possible, 
until after the battle of Adrianople in ^i^ when Constantine 
the Great, who had become Emperor of the West in 312, 
defeated the persecuting tyrant Licinius, and so became the 
undisputed master of the whole Roman Empire. Several 
years before this event bitter controversies which had arisen 
in Alexandria in connection with the new doctrines of Arius 
had been spreading elsewhere. For the first time in its his- 
tory the Christian Church was threatened with general and 



58 ^^A T IS CHRISTIANITY? 

chronic discord; and then, as on all lesser occasions, con- 
sultation became necessary in order that the common judg- 
ment of the Church might be ascertained and delivered. In 
325 the great Council ofNicaea was assembled by command 
of Constantine. It consisted of three hundred and eighteen 
representatives of the Churches of Christendom, from Britain 
to the furthest East, many of whom still bore in their bodies 
scars and mutilations which certified their fidelity to the 
Christian faith in times of savage persecution. The Council 
of Nicaea was the first representative imperial parliament 
that the world had ever seen. Every member of it had 
been chosen to his office by the sufi'rage of the Christian 
community over which he presided; every one of them was 
a sworn maintainer of the constitution of the Christian 
Church; and they were called together to consult for the 
well-being of the Christian Commonwealth throughout the 
Roman Empire, that is, throughout the civilized world. 

Now, observe that they were not there to proclaim a new 
doctrine, but to give their testimony on these two questions 
of fact: — first, whether the doctrine of Arius was, or was 
not, the doctrine they themselves had received as the 
doctrine of Christianity; and second, whether it was con- 
sistent with the doctrine they had received. On the first of 
these questions the testimony was unanimous. No one, 
even on the Arian side, pretended that the doctrine of Arius 
had been explicitly delivered to the Church by Christ or 
His Apostles. It was admitted to be a novelty; the argu- 
ment in its favor was purely philosophical; and conse- 
quently, the true question before the council was whether 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 59 

the new philosophical doctrine of Alius was consistent with 
the established and universal doctrine of the Church. The 
testimony of an immense majority of the Bishops was to 
the contrary. A brief Declaration of certain articles of the 
universal Christian Faith was prepared and published in the 
name of the Council; and, appended to that Declaration, 
was a formal condemnation of the Arian doctrines which 
the Council pronounced to be inconsistent with the 
Christian Faith. The Nicene Declaration and its appended 
Judgment were as follows : 

' ' We believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, Maker 
of all things visible and invisible: 

''And ia one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Be- 
gotten of the Father, Only Begotten, that is, of the sub- 
stance of the Father; God of God, Light of Light, Very 
God of Very* God, Begotten, not made, Being of one sub- 
stance with the Father; By Whom all things were made, 
both those in heaven and those in earth; Who, for us men 
and for our salvation, came down, and was incarnate, and 
was made Man, suffered, and rose again the third day, 
ascended into heaven and cometh again to judge the quick 
and the dead: 

"And in the Holy Ghost. 

'' But them that say that there was (a time) when He was 
not; and that before He was begotten He was not; and 
that He was made of things which are not; or who say that 
the Son of God is of a different substance or essence; or 
that He is subject to conversion or mutation; these the 
Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes." 



60 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

In connection v.ith this Solemn Declaration and Judg- 
ment we must make three weighty observations. 

The first is that it was made reluctantly. If we inspect 
it, we find that it declares the faith of the members of the 
Council concerning only two of the three articles of the 
formula of Baptism, **In the Name of the Father, and of 
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Of the Father it says 
only enough to deny with emphasis the opinion of certain 
heretics who imagined that God is not the maker of the 
visible creation as well as of the invisible world of spirits. Of 
the Son it speaks more fully, so as to show the positive 
belief with which the heresy of Arius was inconsistent. Of 
the Holy Ghost it says not one word beyond an acknowl- 
edgment of its Being. After that, the phrases in which the 
false doctrine of Arius was expressed, are solemnly con- 
demned as manifestly inconsistent with the Christian Faith. 
With that condemnation the Council stopped. It had done 
the duty to which Divine Providence had called it, and 
having faithfully done that duty, it did no more. Very 
clearly the fathers of Nicaea were not anxious to engage 
in extensive definitions of doctrine. Even in doing what 
they did, they acted reluctantly. As in the first Council at 
Jerusalem, there was ''much disputing'' among them. 
Some were utterly opposed to defining anything whatever ; 
others strongly objected to the crucial phrase " of one sub- 
stance with the Father," and all of those who objected to 
it were not by any means disciples of Arius. That identi- 
cal phrase had been used some time before to express a 
view of the relation of the Father and the Son which was 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 61 

as erroneous in one way as the doctrine of Arius was in 
another, and its introduction was therefore extremely dis- 
tasteful to many thoroughly faithful men. Still, after full 
discussion, it was agreed that the language of the Declara- 
tion, in the sense in which it was used by the Council, did 
fairly and faithfully express the common faith of all the 
Churches of Christ, and that the doctrine of Arius, being 
inconsistent with that common faith, must be condemned. 

We must next observe that nobody supposed the Decla- 
ration to be infallibly true, merely because a great and 
venerable Ecumenical Council had adopted it. The 
superstitious notion that Councils of the Church — even 
Ecumenical Councils — are infallible, had not then been 
thought of Even in the Council of Nicaea there were men 
who did little honor to their office. There were trimmers 
who were ready to take either side, if it seemed more likely 
than the other to promote their profit or advancement. 
There were unscrupulous politicians whose views of the- 
ology were reflections of the views of the imperial court, 
and not of the true faith of their respective Churches. 
There were timid men, and there were "moderate" men, 
with a constitutional inclination to compromise, even in 
cases in which the pretence of compromise only covers a 
surrender. There were men, too, who honestly feared that 
the new declaration, and especially its crucial phrase, 
would give great and just offence. And then, among the 
most heroic of the Bishops present, there were some who 
had no more notion of the meaning of the phrase " of one 
substance with Father " than the majority — I speak with all 



62 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

due respect — of those whom I am new addressing. How 
should the decision of such a matter by such an assembly 
be regarded as infallibly true ? Nobody in those days pre- 
tended that it was infallibly true. How then was its truth 
to be tested .? 

In the old way, which was also the simplest way in the 
world, namely by the general judgment of the Churches of 
Christ all the world over. But let us distinguish. Rightly 
stated, the question to be decided by all the Churches was 
not whether the Nicene Declaration was true, but whether 
it was Christian; that is to say, whether it did really and 
truly set forth the faith which all Christian Churches had 
received at the beginning and had held from the beginning. 
To that question the answer was unequivocal. No sooner 
was the Nicene Declaration published than with one con- 
sent all Christian Churches throughout the world bore 
witness that in all the particulars to which it referred, it was 
a true statement of the Christian faith as they had received 
it and held it from the beginning. The Arians themselves 
did not attempt to contradict the universal testimony, but 
in subsequent controversies professed the utmost veneration 
for the Nicene Council and entire submission to the Nicene 
Declaration. 

This they were the more able to do because, as we have 
now, in the third place to observe, the Nicene Declaration 
was not a Creed. It was simply a statement of certain 
truths and a condemnation of certain falsehoods. It was 
not set forth as a substitute for any of the baptismal creeds 
which were in use in different Churches. It was not 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? ^3 

ordered to be used in any part of public worship. The 
Nicene fathers did not wish to mortify the Arians, but to 
win them to the truth, nor do they seem to have had any 
confidence in the efficacy of enforced subscriptions to create 
or maintain purity of doctrine, and therefore their Decla- 
ration was not proposed as a verbal formula to be universally 
subscribed in the very language in which the Council had 
expressed it. Any man who held the faith in its integrity was 
still at liberty to express his faith in any words which were 
consistent with the Solemn Declaration of the Council, 
approved, as it soon was, by the universal acclamation of 
the Catholic Church. 

I must here suspend our historical investigation in order 
to resume it in the first part of the next lecture; but before 
I do so let me remark that in the setting forth of the Nicene 
Declaration there was no enlargement, nor even develop- 
ment, of the Christian Faith as it had been delivered to the 
Churches of Christ by the Apostles of Christ. Some of its 
terms were new; the meaning of those terms was not new; 
and the new terms had been made necessary only to exclude 
new forms of error which threatened the old faith. 

That there was a development of Christian faith in the 
members of the apostolic Church I do not at all deny. 
When our Saviour promised His Disciples that the Holy 
Spirit should teach them all things and bring to their 
remembrance all things which He had personally taught 
them, there must have been some things which they had not 
yet been taught and other things which they had been 
taught, but which they had not sufficiently understood and 



64 ^^A T IS CHRIS TIANITY ? 

were therefore likely to forget. In the present lecture we 
have seen how plainly our Lord had spoken of the catholicity 
of their apostolic commission, how imperfectly they must 
have understood that part of His teaching, how completely 
they forgot it and how gradually they were brought to re- 
member it and to accept the unforeseen consequences which 
were to attend it. It was only bit by bit, as they were able 
to bear it, that their Master's teaching was recalled to their 
remembrance, and that they were guided into new truth 
which they had been slowly prepared to receive and apply. 
The new things which they were to be taught by the 
promised Spirit were none the less new to the Apostles be- 
cause they were implied in other things which thev had 
been already taught. When Peter first made his great con- 
fession, *'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," 
he had little understanding of the deep significance of his 
own words. In his sermon on the day of Pentecost, and in 
his brave speech to the people by the Beautiful Gate of the 
Temple, we find a fuller understanding of the meaning of 
that confession than he could possibly have had before the 
resurrection of our Saviour; but when we compare all that 
he said in those two discourses with the immeasurably 
larger and more spiritual apprehension of Christ — of the 
Sinless Sufferer for mankind, of the priestly character of His 
atonement, of the priestly and princely dignity of His peo- 
ple, and of the privilege of partaking in His sufferings, 
which is a sure pledge of the partaking of His glory — all of 
which and more we find in Peter's First Epistle, welling out 
of the rich maturity of his later life, it is impossible not to 



WIIA T IS CHRISTIANITY? ^5 

see how many things this Prince of the Apostles had been 
taught by the Spirit of Christ during the years which had 
intervened. 

We often hear men say, Give us the Christianity of 
Christ ! It is a most just demand. It represents a lawful 
and laudable resentment at the endless additions to the 
Christianity of Christ by which the Gospel has been ob- 
scured and Christ Himself has been hidden behind a mass 
of vain inventions. By all means let us have the Christian- 
ity of Christ, and nothing else than that. But let us have 
the whole of it ! Let us hiave all that the Apostles remem- 
bered and the Evangelists recorded; and then let us have 
the deep meaning of it all, the fulness of the truth of it, 
which the Holy Spirit revealed to them. There is a true 
and scriptural theory, as well as a false and sophistical 
theory, of the development of Christian doctrine. The 
latter is purely individual and sectarian, and would justify 
any development which the misdirected energy of self-will 
might happen to construct; the former is catholic, and jus- 
tifies only that development which is proved to have been 
natural and normal by the simple fact that it was universal. 
When one recollects these facts; — that the Apostles by 
whom the faith was propagated were scattered far asunder 
to the very ends of the civilized world and even among the 
barbarians; that many of the Churches which they planted 
had no communication with each other for more than two 
hundred and fifty years; that within two years after it was 
made physically and politically possible for their representa- 
tives to meet together, they did meet in council to declare 



66 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 

their several versions of their common faith ; and that those 
versions, separately received and separately preserved in 
communities of men differing in race, in language, in tradi- 
tion, in custom and in civilization, were found to be in all 
essential points identical; — when one remembers these 
things, he must first be struck, I think, with the social in- 
stinct and sense of unity which brought such men together, 
and then with the impossibility that their common tradition 
should have been derived from any other than one common 
source. Whatever development of thought we may imag- 
ine we discover in their phraseology is more apparent than 
real. It is only the development of the implicit into the 
explicit, the universal and necessary growth of one and the 
self-same fulness of truth into one and the self-same fitness 
of form. Its necessity is demonstrated by its universality. 
Like springs from like, and it grows to like. *'Men do 
not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles. " The Chris- 
tianity which had been separately received, which for centu- 
ries had been separately held, and which was then set forth 
with one consent by all Churches throughout the world, can 
have been none other than the Christianity which was 
everywhere delivered by Christ's Apostles; and the Christian- 
ity of the Apostles was the Christianity of Christ. 



LECTURE III. 
THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 



LECTURE III. 

THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

THE NICENE CREED FIRST SET FORTH AS A SUFFICIENT AND 

UNALTERABLE FORMULA OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH BY THE 
COUNCIL OF CHALCEDON. ITS UNIVERSAL OBLIGATION. 

ITS GUARANTEE OF DOCTRINAL LIBERTY. IT SETS THE 

LIMITS OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS. IT EXCLUDES THE 

POSSIBILITY OF CONFLICT BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND 
SCIENCE OR VERACIOUS CRITICISM. 

The faith which was once delivered to the saints. — Jude 3. 

The Creed represents the Catholic judgment. — Rev. Charles Gork. 

The best minds of the future are to be neither religious minds defying 
scientific advances nor scientific minds denying religion, but minds in 
which religion interprets and is interpreted by science, in which faith 
and inquiry subsist together and reinforce one another. — Ibid. 

Religion claims as its own the new light which metaphysics and sci- 
ence in our day are throwing upon the immanence of God; it protests only 
against those imperfect, because premature, syntheses which, in the inter- 
ests of abstract speculation, would destroy religion. — Aubrey More. 

This much I may say, that after a life, already not a short one, spent 
in the study of science and philosophical divinity, and living in equal 
intimacy with men of science and with thoughtful divines, I have learned 
nothing which can reasonably disturb an impartial mind, either in its 
conviction of the truths of Christianity, as interpreted by the more 
moderate sections of the Christian Church, or in its acceptance of the 
divine inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures, not indeed as literal or 
punctual, but as generic and substantial. I am equally assured that the 
general development of human knowledge is friendly to these considera- 
tions.— Prof. Pritchard. 
69 



70 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

Whatever meanings different theologians may attach to supernatural 
religion, history teaches us that nothing is so natural as the super- 
natural. — Max Muller. 

The theory of evolution is quite compatible with the beifef in God. — 
Charles Darwin. 

I cannot for a moment admit that the theory of evolution will alter 
our theological views. — Professor Jevons. 

The doctrine of evolution leaves the argument for an intelligent Crea- 
tor and Governor of the world stronger than before. — Bishop Temple. 

Those who hoped that molecular science would help them to get rid 
of God have obviously made a profound mistake. It has already shown 
far more clearly than ever was or could have been anticipated, that 
every atom of matter points back beyond itself to the all- originating 
will of God. — Professor Flint. 

So keenly were the Christians of the early period conscious of the one 
life of nature as the evidence of the Spirit, that it was a point of the 
charge against Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion 
of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of His activity to the 
Church. — Rev. Charles Gore. 

In humanity made after the Divine Image, it was the original inten- 
tion of God that the Spirit should find His chiefest joy. — Ibid. 

The belief in the Holy Scriptures as inspired requires to be held in 
context by the belief in the general action of the Holy Spirit upon the 
Christian Society and the individual soul. It is, we may perhaps say, 
becoming more and more difficult to believe in the Bible without believ- 
ing in the Church The apostolic writings were written as 

occasion required, within the Church and for the Church. They pre- 
suppose membership in it and familiarity with its tradition. They are 
secondary, not primary, instructors; for edification, not for initiation. 
Nor, in fact, can a hard and fast line be drawn between what lies within 
and what lies without the canon. — Ibid. 

We cannot make any exact claim upon any one's belief in regard to 
Inspiration, simply because we have no authoritative definition to bring 
to bear upon him. Those of us who believe most in the inspiration of 
the Church will see a divine purpose in this absence of dogma, because 
we shall perceive that only now is the state of knowledge such as admits 
of the question being legitimately raised. — Ibid. 

If the Christian Church has been able to defeat the critical attack, so 
far as it threatened destruction to the historical basis of the New Testa- 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 71 

ment, it has not been by foreclosing tlie question with an appeal to 
dogma, but by facing in fair and frank discussion the problems raised. 
A similar treatment of Old Testament problems will enable us to distin- 
guish between what is reasonable and reverent, and what is high-handed 
and irreligious in contemporary criticism, whether German, French or 
English. — Ibid. 

It is one of the horrors of religious controversy that it 
casts out charity. Controversy is oftener waged for the 
glory of victory than for the glory of God; and when victory 
becomes the chief aim of the combatants, the charity which 
thinketh no evil is forgotten, because it is necessary to think 
evil and to say evil in order to discredit the adversary. Nay, 
the tactics of controversy are plied to catch the adversary in 
some false position, and even to drive him as far as possible 
from the truth in order to prove how wrong he is. For the 
most part what is called Christian controversy is egregiously 
misnamed, because, whatever else it may be, it is anything 
rather than Christian. It is nearly always un-Christian; it is 
often anti-Christian; it is sometimes diabolical. What it is 
now it was in the days of the Apostles of Christ, and such 
it was in the Nicene period. At the Council of Nicaea, 
great and venerable as it was, there was much controversy, 
and not a little of the un-Christian spirit of controversy. It 
cannot be said that the catholics were all right and the 
heretics all wrong. As it often happens in such affairs, not 
a few men got on the side to which they did not properly 
belong. There were some who sincerely held the catholic 
faith and yet were forced at one time or another, and in one 
way or another, into an apparent support of the partisans 
of Arius; and there were some who figured as champions of 



72 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

orthodoxy who were in fact nearly or quite as far wrong in 
one direction as Arius was in the other. The Church of 
England is largely justified in holding that General Councils, 
' ' forasmuch as they be assemblies of men, whereof all be not 
governed by the Spirit of God, may err, and sometimes have 
erred." The late Dean Church has admirably said that "in 
the early and undivided church there was such a thing as 
authonty, and there was no such thing known as infalli- 
bility." Hence it was not in the final agreement of a large 
majority of the Council of Nicaea (as though that agreement 
must needs have been infallible,) but in the authoritative ver- 
dict of the universal Church, that the Declaration of Nicaea 
found its true sanction, and the sufficient testimony that its 
contents were agreeable to the Word of God as received and 
held by all the Churches of Christ. After that for a time, 
there was peace. Those who had been right from the be- 
ginning and those who had been really right in their in- 
tentions but who had been betrayed into a false position 
at some part of the proceedings, adhered to the Nicene 
Declaration; those who had been really wrong concealed 
their opposition under a pretence of acquiescence. Very 
soon the defeated Arians began to assail the faith by indi- 
rection. The unrestrained liberty which still allowed every 
Christian Church and indeed every Christian teacher to 
frame statements of Christian doctrine, provided only 
that they should not contradict the Declaration of Nicaea, 
was unscrupulously used. The secret favorers of Arianism, 
while professing entire submission to the Nicene Declaration, 
introduced forms of expression which were really contra- 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 73 

dictory of it, and so, in various places, insidiously planted 
heresy, while professing to be champions of catholic 
truth. 

Within a few years after the close of the Nicene Council 
raise charges were trumped up against Athanasius, the 
champion of the faith; and although they were completely 
disproved in a council held at Tyre, A. D. 335, the Arian 
sympathizers, finding themselves, to their surprise, in a 
majority, deposed him from his archbishopric, and banished 
him from his see. Six years later, the dedication of a great 
Church at Antioch was made the occasion of holding another 
council of one hundred Bishops, and again the Arian sen- 
timent predominated. The council professed the utmost 
reverence for " the holy and great Synod" of Nicaea; but 
they soon showed that their object was to gain authority 
among catholics by pretending to be catholics in the fullest 
sense of the word. They set forth more than one Declara- 
tion of Faith in terms of their own choosing, and their 
language was so carefully chosen to avoid offence to catho- 
lics that one of their Declarations was confessed to be sus- 
ceptible of an orthodox interpretation. Their true animus, 
however, was exhibited by the adoption of two canons, 
in themselves unobjectionable, but the first of which had 
all the effect of a new decree of deposition against Athan- 
asius, while the second amounted to a prohibition of his 
restoration, since it virtually forbade the rehearing of his 
cause before a higher and more competent tribunal than 
the Synod of Tyre had been. On the v/hole, the actioi) of 
the Council of Antioch was so adroit that, although the 



74 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

disloyalty of its purpose was perfectly well understood, it 
could not be set aside. 

The-Arians began again to take courage, and while the 
objectionable phrases of Arius concerning the Person of 
Christ were studiously avoided, similar language began to 
be used concerning the Holy Spirit. Other forms of er- 
ror likewise began to prevail throughout the East, and 
a council of oriental Bishops, one hundred and fifty in 
number, was assembled at Constantinople, A. D. 389. 
This council reasserted the Nicene Declaration, emphasiz- 
ing it by the introduction of a few significant phrases, 
and adding to it, as a corrective of the Arian denials con- 
cerning the Holy Spirit and other recent errors, all the 
additional matter contained in the Creed which is now 
commonly called the Nicene. 

Again the voice of the Universal Church approved the 
Declaration of this council, so that although the number 
of its members was so small, and although there was not 
one Bishop of the Western Church among them, the Coun- 
cil of Constantinople was forthwith accepted and acknow- 
ledged as an Ecumenical Council by the acclamation of 
the whole Church, Eastern and Western. 

Again, too, we must observe that it was not the votes of 
the one hundred and fifty Bishops of Constantinople, but 
the universal testimony of the Christian world, which es- 
tablished the fact that the Declaration of those Bishops 
contained a true statement of the universal Christian Faith 
concerning the matters of which it spoke. 

And again we have to observe that the Declaration of 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE, 75 

Constantinople was not a creed imposed upon Christen- 
dom. It was not intended as a substitute for the baptis- 
mal creeds which were in use in the different Churches. 
The Council adopted no canon requiring it to be general- 
ly subscribed, even in the Churches whose Bishops were 
present. Afterwards, as before, it was open to Christian 
people everywhere to profess the Christian Faith in what- 
ever language they found most acceptable to themselves. 

But again, as before, those who were inclined to heresies 
made large use of that liberty, and a new error made its ap- 
pearance in the heresy attributed to Nestorius. 

Accordingly, a third great council was assembled at Eph- 
esus, A. D. 431, at which many Eastern Bishops were in 
attendance and the Western Churches were represented by 
delegates from Rome. This was the most stormy of all 
the Ecumenical Councils. Its judgment of particular cases 
was the judgment merely of a majority of its members, to 
which the minority refused to submit. Its doctrinal deci- 
sions were likewise rejected by the minority, and when the 
council broke up in confusion, it seemed as if a permanent 
schism had been inaugurated. But it was not so. The 
acts of the council were speedily approved and its judg- 
ments sustained by the adhesion of the whole Church; and, 
after a time of reflection, most of the minority submitted in 
good faith. 

But the Council of Ephesus differed from the previous 
Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in this, that it set 
forth no new Declaration of the Faith. The particular 
heresy it had to deal with was that of Nestorius, who was 



7G THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

charged with teaching that the *' Holy Thing" which was 
born of the Blessed Virgin, and was called the Son of God, 
was not God. This was clearly inconsistent with the 
Nicene Declaration, and no new declaration was needed to 
expose the inconsistency. On the contrary, if any new de- 
claration had been set forth, the Nestorians might have pre- 
tended that the Council, and not they, had introduced an 
innovation. 

In dealing with the Nestorian heresy the Council had 
found the Nicene Declaration to be a touchstone of error 
in the matters of which it treats. It was high time that it 
should be recognized as such. The liberty of making 
formulas of faith had been tremendously abused and re- 
quired to be restrained. It was absurd that the meeting of 
an Ecumenical Council should be necessary whenever some 
presumptuous priest or bishop took it upon him to recon- 
struct the Christian religion. Therefore the Council of 
Ephesus formally declared that it was both the right and 
the duty of local authorities to assume jurisdiction and 
to pronounce judgment in such cases. After the Nicene 
Declaration had been solemnly read in open Council, the 
following Resolution, as we should call it, was adopted, 
and is now known as the Seventh Canon of Ephesus: 

"These things having been read, the Holy Synod decrees 
that it is unlawful for any man to produce, or to compile, 
or to compose a different Faith, contrary to that established 
by the holy and blessed Fathers assembled, with the Holy 
Ghost, in Nicaea. 

" But those who shall presume to compose or to produce 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 77 

or offer a different Faith to persons desiring to turn to the 
acknowledgment of the truth, whether from Heathenism or 
from Judaism, or from any heresy whatsoever, shall be de- 
posed, if they be Bishops or Clergymen; Bishops from the 
Episcopate and Clergymen from the Clergy; and if they be 
laymen, they shall be anathematized." 

The Seventh Canon of Ephesus is generally but errone- 
ously supposed to have set forth the Nicene Declaration as 
a creed in the strict sense of the word, but, as a creed, we 
have clearly seen that the Nicene Declaration would have 
been defective in several important particulars; and if the 
Fathers of Ephesus had intended to establish a creed for 
universal use, they would hardly have forgotten the Decla- 
ration of Constantinople, which would have perfectly an- 
swered that end. In what they did they followed the in- 
variable example of their predecessors. They went no fur- 
ther than the matters before them required that they should 
go. In those matters they had found the Nicene Decla- 
ration to be sufficient and satisfactory; and they thereupon 
enacted, first, that it should thenceforward be an ecclesias- 
tical offence to compile or compose any doctrinal state- 
ment which should be inconsistent with that Declaration; 
and second, that to offer or propound any such statement 
to any person desiring to enter the Christian Church should 
be punishable with the penalty of deposition. It must 
be admitted, I think, that the language of the canon is 
obscure. Closely examined, it seems to have been made 
up of two originally independent propositions, one of 
which was probably engrafted on the other as a rider or 



78 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

amendment; and in a council so stormy, it would be noth- 
ing wonderful if such an amendment were to be clumsily 
joined to the original proposition. This, at all events, is 
clear, that if the council intended the very language of the 
Nicene Declaration to be universally obligatory, it did not 
say so; and it is equally clear that if it intended to make 
the Nicene Declaration a test of all heresies, it adopted a 
formula which the Fathers of Constantinople had found to 
be insufficient to answer that purpose. 

Twenty years later the work which was imperfectly done 
by the Council of Ephesus was unequivocally completed. 
In 451 the greatest of all the Councils, numbering six hun- 
dred and thirty bishops, assembled at Chalcedon for the 
correction of recently invented forms of heresy; and as the 
Council of Ephesus had found that the definition of Nicaea, 
fairly and grammatically construed in its obvious sense, was 
a sufficient protection against Nestorianism, so the Fathers 
of Chalcedon found that, in the definitions of Nicsea and 
Constantinople united, the Church had a sufficient protec- 
tion against all heresies whatsoever. It was now a hundred 
and twenty-six years since the Council of Nicsea had as- 
sembled, and nearly four hundred and twenty years since 
the Apostles had received their commission to go and teach 
all nations. In all that time the Catholic Church had never 
but twice, and then with great reluctance, exercised its su- 
preme function of exact doctrinal definition. Heretics, on 
the contrary, had been ever ready with irreverent self-con- 
ceit to affirm or deny, as the whim took them; and the ab- 
sence of a fixed formula or symbol of faith had been severe- 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 79 

ly felt. For want of it, faithful members of the Church had 
been liable to be led away by heretics who professed the 
greatest devotion to orthodoxy and the utmost reverence for 
the Councils of the Church, but who availed themselves of 
the unrestrained liberty of exposition to set forth new for- 
mulas which were inconsistent with the faith of the Catholic 
Church. In like manner heathen persons embracing Chris- 
tianity, and heretics or schismatics desiring to return into the 
one fold, were liable to be required by pretentious priests 
to subscribe to formulas which were not only unauthorized, 
but which were expressly designed to teach heresy in the 
Church itself. The necessity of having not only sound and 
sufficient definitions of the Faith, but also a fixed and un- 
alterable form of words by which to test the soundness of 
other definitions, had at length become manifest. The 
Declarations of Nicsea, and Constantinople, were theologi- 
cally exact in their terms; they had been unequivocally ap- 
proved by the Christian Churches throughout the whole 
world ; and they had been found to be amply sufficient 
in their scope to express the Catholic Faith. Therefore the 
Fathers of Chalcedon, in dealing with the new heresies of 
their day, imitated the example of the Fathers of Ephesus. 
They did not adopt or impose new definitions. They 
tested disputed doctrines by simply comparing them with 
the definitions of Nicsea and Constantinople. For the pro- 
tection of the Church in the future they renewed the prohi- 
bition of Ephesus, which forbade the setting forth of any 
doctrinal statement which should be inconsistent with the 
definitions of Nicaea; they extended that prohibition to state- 



80 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

ments inconsistent with the definitions of Constantinople; 
and lastly, they declared that not only the doctrines ex- 
pressed in those definitions, but the very ipsissima verba, the 
identical words in which they were defined, should be and 
remain unalterable. The distinction is very clearly brought 
out in the two words pistis and symbolon; pistis referring to 
the doctrine, and symbolon to the formula, of the Creed. 
Repeating the prohibition of Ephesus, the Fathers of Chal- 
cedon declared ''that it is not lawful for any man to pro- 
duce, or compile, or compose, or hold, or teach to others 
any different faith [heteran pis/m)," a prohibition which 
manifestly applied to the substance of the Faith and to all 
modes of teaching; and then they proceeded furthermore 
to enact that "those who shall presume EITHER to com- 
pose a different faith {pistin), OR to publish, or teach, or 
deliver a different formula {symbolon), to persons desirous 
of turning to the truth from heathenism, or Judaism, or 
any heresy whatsoever, shall be deposed, if they be bish- 
ops or clergymen — bishops from the Episcopate and Cler- 
gymen from the Clergy; and, if they be monks or laymen 
they shall be anathematized." 

A few words more will complete our brief historical ex- 
cursus. The Decrees of the Council of Chalcedon were re- 
ceived and approved by the whole Christian world. The Ni- 
cene declaration, with the additions made at Constantino- 
ple, was acknowledged to be a full and sufficient statement 
of the Christian Faith, and a touchstone of all heresies, so 
that any man who assented to that Creed, for it was now 
emphatically a Creed, could not lawfully be required to 



THE CHALCEDONIAJSr DECREE. gj 

subscribe to any other statement of doctrine, however true 
it might be, as a condition of communion in any Christian 
Church on earth. Such was the unanimous judgment and 
decree of the w-hole Christian Commonwealth, 

From that auspicious day to this, the Chalcedonian De- 
cree has been neither repealed nor amended. After the 
great Council of Chalcedon only two councils of an undis- 
puted ecumenical character were ever held, the Second and 
Third Councils of Constantinople. In both of them serious 
errors of doctrine were examined and condemmed, but in 
neither of them was it necessary to set forth any new defini- 
tions of doctrine, because it was found that when the errors 
in question were submitted to the test of the Nicseno-Con- 
stantinopolitan Creed, they were so clearly inconsistent with 
it that not to have condemmed them would have been to 
renounce the Nicene Faith. 

Since the Third Council of Constantinople no Church Coun- 
cil, calling itself ecumenical, has really been so. There 
have been General Councils of the Eastern Churches, and 
of the Western Churches; but not one of them has been 
ecumenical; and the decisions of none of them have been 
approved by universal Christendom. Their doctrinal de- 
crees have been expressions of local opinion; they have 
been powerless to add one jot to the faith of the Church 
Catholic. Whenever any of them, in the face of the Decree 
of Chalcedon, has presumed to make the reception of its 
doctrinal opinions a condition of Christian communion, it 
has thereby transgressed a fundamental law of the Christian 
Commonwealth, and every Bishop, Priest or Deacon will- 



82 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

inglj consenting to such action has incurred the penalty of 
deposition from his office. 

We must not imagine, however, that the Council of Chal- 
cedon required the Nicene Creed to be substituted for the 
simpler baptismal creeds which were used in different 
Churches. It was neither to be expected nor to be desired 
that children, peasants and other illiterate persons, that is 
to say, a vast majority of mankind, should be vexed with 
the subtleties of theological distinctions. It was wholly 
unnecessary that thev should be tau2:ht the differences be- 
tween homo-ousios and homoi-ousios. Therefore the old pro- 
vincial formulas continued, at least in the AVestern Churches, 
to be as freelv used as thev had been before. So lonsr as 
Christian people could declare that they sincerely believed 
those formulas, they were just as much Christian people as 
they would have been if they had lived before the Council 
of Xicsea was held. But whenever they were tempted to 
refine upon the faith they had professed at baptism, and 
especially when they were eager to tell what they did not 
believe, the Nicene Creed was there to test whether their 
opinions did or not accord with the unanimous judgment 
of the Christian Church. If their opinions agreed with the 
Nicene Creed, they were Christian opinions; and whether 
they were true or false, or wise or foolish, if they were not 
contradictor}' of the Nicene Creed, they might be lawfully 
held by Christian people without prejudice to their Chris- 
tianity. 

I submit to you, then, that in the Creed commonly called 
the Nicene we have a sufficient statement of the doctrinal 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 83 

part of the Christian religion, set forth as such by lawful 
representatives of the whole Christian Commonwealth; ac- 
claimed as such by the universal Christian Church; never re- 
pealed by any world-wide Christian assembly; and now pro- 
fessed by nineteen-twentieths of all who call themselves 
Christians. 

Those who explicitly hold the Apostles' Creed, without 
denying any part of the Nicene Creed — which is the precise 
position of most Christian lay-people — do implicitly hold 
the Nicene doctrine, and to-day, in spite of all divisions, 
the Church of Rome, the Anglican Churches, the Oriental 
Churches, and all the greater Protestant denominations, 
such as the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, and the Metho- 
dists, maintain the Nicene Creed itself Nay more, even 
bodies of Christians who imagine that their Christian liberty 
vv^ould be endangered by a formal admission of written 
creeds, do in fact hold the faith of universal Christendom 
as it is summarily contained in the Apostles' Creed, and 
they hold it in the very sense in which it is more precisely 
expressed in the Nicene Creed. In other words, notwith- 
standing all existing divisions, universal Christendom, vir- 
tually with one accord, still maintains the Christian Faith, 
as it was set forth at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and 
Chalcedon. Moreover, the universal Christian world agrees 
in nothing else. Every Church, at one time or another, 
has attempted some improvement on the One Faith of the 
Church Catholic, and every time when any Church has 
done so has been a time, and the beginning of a time, of 
fresh discords and of new divisions. Only in the One 



84: TEE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

Faith has any sort of unity been maintained; and by the 
One Faith, I think that our historical excursus justifies us 
in understanding that which is set forth in the Creed com- 
monly called the Nicene. 

That, at least, is the unequivocal position of the Church 
to which we belong. The Bishops of the American Church 
in 1887 set forth a Declaration concerning the conditions 
of a restoration of visible Christian Unity in which they 
mentioned as one of the indispensable points, **the Nicene 
Creed, as a sufficient statement of Christian doctrine. " In 
1888 the Bishops of the Anglican Churches all the world 
over assembled at Lambeth, and endorsed the previous 
Declaration of the American Bishops. So far, therefore, as 
we are concerned, our Church stands firmly by the Church 
of the first centuries. Her Christianity is the Christianity of 
Chalcedon, not one jot less, and not a single jot more. 

So far as doctrine goes, we are therefore entitled to say 
that the only Christianity in behalf of which we are bound 
to find sufficient evidence is the Christianity of the Nicene 
Creed. Let those who care to do so trouble themselves to 
prove the hundreds of pious, non-pious and impious opinions 
with which the Christianity of Christ and His Apostles has 
too often been overloaded and almost submerged. We are 
content to stand by that statement of its truths which the 
universal voice of Christian men and Christian Churches has 
accepted in every age and every land as the Christian Faith 
which was once delivered to the saints. To show the truth 
of that statement is to prove the truth of Christianity, be- 
cause, if that is true, Christianity is true, while the volu- 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE §5 

minous theological aberglaube of sects and doctors has often 
so obscured, defaced and deformed the truth of Christ that 
one might justly set it down as an invention of the Enemy 
of Souls to make the truth itself incredible. 

Allow me now briefly to state the results, as I conceive 
them, of our examination of historical facts. 

We have seen how the Providence of God guided the Uni- 
versal Church of the early ages, step by step, in successive 
measures for the defence of the Christian Faith. We have 
seen that, at every step, it was not by the personal author- 
ity even of the Apostles, nor by the arguments of Doctors, 
nor by arbitrary decrees of Councils, that the Christianity 
or non-Christianity of new doctrines was decided, but by 
the morally unanimous judgment of the universal Church 
of Christ, to which the guidance of the Spirit of Christ was 
promised. We have seen the extreme reluctance with which 
Councils of the Church were constrained to compose formal 
definitions of faith. We have seen how slow they were to 
set forth such definitions as verbally obligatory creeds, even 
when necessity required them to be set forth as declarations 
of Christian truth. We have seen that the Nicaeno-Constan- 
tinopolitan Symbol, commonly called the Nicene Creed, was 
at last established at the Council ofChalcedon, not to super- 
sede the customary baptismal creeds of local Churches, but 
as a bulwark against heresies. We have seen that it was then 
set forth, with the moral consent of all Christendom, both as 
a sufficient statement of Christian Doctrine and as a consti- 
tutional law of Christian liberty, so that opinions which are 
not in conflict with it may be freely held without prejudice 



86 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

to the Christianity of him who holds them. We have seen 
that it was then declared to be a high crime and misdemea- 
nor, punishable with deposition and excommunication, to 
demand of any man, as a condition of Christian commun- 
ion, that he should receive or believe anything not con- 
tained in that symbol. We have seen that no consentient 
action of the Christian Church has ever repealed that un- 
animous decree, which is consequently still binding in every 
part of the universal Church. We have seen that, as a mat- 
ter of fact, the truths expressed in that symbol are still held, 
explicitly or implicitly, by an immense majority of all who 
profess and call themselves Christians, however separated 
from each other in other respects. Finally, we have seen 
that the separated bodies of Christians who are one in that 
faith, are at one in hardly anything else. Having seen these 
things, we are at liberty to join in the acclamation which 
was raised in the Council of Chalcedon at the adoption of 
the Chalcedonian Decree. The Acts of the Council record 
that after it had been read, the assembled Bishops cried 
out: *' This is the Faith of the Fathers. This is the Faith 
of the Apostles. By this we all stand. This we all be- 
lieve." 

Assuming, then, that the Nicene Creed is a sufficient state- 
ment, and the only indisputably authorized statement, of 
the Christian Faith, that is, of the Christian religion on its 
doctrinal side, it clearly follows that the Nicene Creed sets 
the limit of Christian apologetics. Whatever is not con- 
tained, explicitly or implicitly, in that creed may be true 
and edifying; but the verity of the Christian religion is not 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 87 

in the least bound up with it. Hence it is of the utmost 
importance carefully to scrutinize the Nicene Creed and to 
see whether it does, or does not sanction several doctrinal 
theories or opinions which are popularly supposed to be es- 
sential to the Christian Faith, but which are really no part 
of Christianity. If there are such doctrines, the result of 
our scrutiny will be to discriminate the Christian Faith in 
its integrity at once from pious and edifying doctrines which 
may lawfully be held by Christian people whose great privi- 
lege it may be to have learned them, but which are not es- 
sential to a genuine Christianity, and also, perhaps, from 
certain other opinions which are held, undoubtedly, by many 
Christian people, but only to the detriment, though not to 
the destruction, of their Christianity. 

Beginning, then, at the beginning of the Nicene Creed^ 
we find that in its very first clause it delivers us from a 
thousand imaginary difficulties of the present time by ex- 
cluding the whole ground of a controversy which ought 
never to have been begun; I mean the so-called conflict 
between science and religion. Science investigates the 
operations of nature which religion maintains to be the 
work — and possibly more than the mere work — of God. 
How God has made nature, the Christian religion, as it is 
stated in the Nicene Creed, does not pretend to tell; and 
there is nothing in the investigations of science which so 
much as touches the utmost verge of the sublime affirmation 
that *'God the Father Almighty " is the " Maker of heaven 
and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." The 
one statement supplements the other; that is all. Science 



88 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

has never proved, and never can prove, that nature is not 
the work of God. On that subject conflict between science 
and religion is impossible. Scientific men may indeed be 
atheists; but atheism is not science. Atheism is a negation 
which can never be proved, and which every successive dis- 
covery of science shows to be less and less probable. 

It is concerning the method of creation, rather than the 
fact of creation, that science and religion are supposed to 
be in conflict with each other. Scientific men, with almost 
absolute unanimity, have accepted the theory of evolution, 
and, for my part, though I must insist on remembering that 
the evolution theory is to this hour nothing more than an un- 
verified theory, I find no insurmountable religious difficulty 
to attend that theory. Certainly there is nothing in it to 
contradict the Nicene Creed. Mr. Spencer defines the pro- 
cess of evolution as follows: "Evolution is an integration of 
matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which 
the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogene- 
ity to a definite, coherent homogeneity; and during which 
the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." 
Now, I do not pretend to understand that definition as well 
as I should like to understand it; but we may understand 
from it, at least, that evolution, since it is a process, must 
have had a beginning. We may further understand that 
before the process of evolution began there existed an un- 
diff"erentiated chaos in which everything was like every thing 
else, and nothing was related to anything else; nothing had 
any properties or qualities by which it could be distinguished 
from another thing, or by which it could attract, or repel, or 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE, 39 

Otherwise affect another thing. In such a chaos there can 
have been no motion, because the presence of motion would 
have created changes of relation, and would consequently 
have begun a process of differentiation and integration. If, 
therefore, we have now a world in which the originally dead 
homogeneity of chaos has given place to a universe of hetero- 
geneous individualities which are reciprocally related to each 
other, it is because of the introduction of motion; and the in- 
troduction of motion implies the introduction of yet another 
factor. That factor is force, without which it is impossible 
to conceive of the beginning of any motion whatever. Thus 
the very statement of the theory of evolution concedes, or 
rather asserts, the existence of an originally undifferentiated 
and motionless chaos, from which the present universe has 
been evolved by the operation of a force or forces which 
cannot have been originally present in it. 

But when the evolutionist investigates the forces of the uni- 
verse, as they now exist and operate in nature, he finds that 
they all appear to be forms of one single, subtle force v/hich 
eludes his search, and which, when it seems to have been 
destroyed, has only changed its form and mode of operation. 
Thus he is brought at length to admire what he calls " the 
persistence of force," by which, says Mr. Spencer, "we 
really mean the persistence of some power which transcends 
our knowledge and conception. The manifestations of 
force (he continues) occurring either in ourselves or out- 
side of ourselves do not persist; but that which does persist 
is the unknown cause of these manifestations. In other 
words, asserting the persistence of force is but another mode 



90 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 



of asserting an unconditioned reality without beginning or 
end." 

Now, against all this the Nicene Creed has little to say. 
The difference between the evolutionist and the Nicene 
Creed is: First, That the evolutionist, as such, assumes, but 
does not account for, the existence of an original undiffer- 
entiated chaos, while the Nicene Creed, without joining in 
that questionable assumption, does account even for such 
a chaos, if it ever did exist; second, that the evolutionist, as 
such, has no name for the unconditioned and eternal Power 
from which all forces proceed, while the Nicene Creed gives 
it the name of God; third, that the evolutionist calls the 
change from an undifferentiated chaos to an orderly uni- 
verse a process, while the Nicene Creed calls it a making or 
creation; and fourth, that the evolutionist has a theory of 
the creative process, while the Nicene Creed has none. Be- 
tween the evolutionist and the Nicene Christian there is no 
irreconcilable conflict, nor any conflict at all. If an evolu- 
tionist does not deny that the uncreated and eternal Reality, 
by which the substance as well as the forces of nature con- 
sist, is God, his theory of evolution will work no prejudice 
to the Christian faith, which neither affirms nor denies any 
theory whatever of the method of creation. 

I have chosen to refer thus fully to the theory of evolution, 
because it is the only scientific theory with which any state- 
ment of the Nicene Creed could by any possibility be sup- 
posed to conflict, and when we discover that there is no 
necessary conflict between them, we must surely conclude 
that any and every conflict between science and Nicene 



THE CHALCEDOYIAN DECREE. 91 

Christianity is as unnecessary as it is unnatural. If scien- 
tific men have been too ready to assume that their discover- 
ies are fatal to Christianity, we can only say that the only 
summary statement of Christianity which has any claim to 
be universally authoritative does not justify that assumption; 
and, on the other hand, if too many impetuous Christians 
have been equally swift, or perhaps more swift, to declare 
that scientific discoveries are subversive of Christianity, we 
have again to say that the admission may be true of their 
personal or sectarian versions of Christianity, but that it is 
absolutely untrue of the Christianity of the Nicene Creed. 
A conflict between science and sectarianism is always pos- 
sible; a conflict between science and genuine Catholic Chris- 
tianity is not possible, because the Nicene Creed makes no 
affirmation of any kind, with which any discovery of physi- 
cal science has been, or ever can be, inconsistent. 

It does not follow, however, that physical science and the 
Christian religion have nothing to do with each other. Sci- 
ence as well as religion is occupied with "invisible things 
of God," which are "clearly seen " in the sensible phenomena 
of nature; and, therefore, a reverent and veracious study of 
nature must, in the end, be serviceable to religion. I hold 
it, for example, to be no light matter that a scientific evo- 
lutionist like Mr. Spencer indignantly repudiates the gross 
materialism of which he has so frequently been claimed as 
an adherent. I count it for much in the religious educa- 
tion of the world that such a man as he declares that the in- 
vestigation of physical nature by a rigid scientific method 
proves the universal presence of an uncreated and eternal 



92 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

Power to be "the most certain of all things.'" I am not dis- 
couraged when I observe that he does not profess to find in 
nature a sufficient proof of the "Godhead" of the Inscrut- 
able Power which nature manifests, because religion does 
not say that Godhead is revealed in nature, and an inspired 
religious sage mournfully asks: "Canst thou by searching 
find out God ? Canst thou find out the Almighty to per- 
fection ? It is high as heaven — what canst thou do ? It is 
deeper than hell — what canst thou know ? " Yet I con- 
fess that I am strengthened to find that Mr. Spencer does 
implicitly maintain what St. Paul maintains, that is, the di- 
vinity of the Inscrutable Power which is manifested in na- 
ture; for what else than divine can that power be which con- 
tains within itself the potentiality of all Powers and forces, 
physical, intellectual, social and moral, and which is so 
transcendently exalted above humanity as to be beyond the 
reach alike of human scrutiny and of human understand- 
ing ? Thus, true science, and just so far as it is true sci- 
ence, comes in aid of faith; nay, it is itself a way to faith. 
True science is simply the result of a carefully exact reading 
of God's book of nature, followed by a carefully methodical 
arrangement of the revelations which are found there; and 
how far the investigations of science may be destined here- 
after to confirm religion, no man can foretell. There is 
profound truth in these lines of the prophetic poet of our 
time : 

'< Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies; — 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand. 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 93 



Little flower: — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God is and man is !" 

The time limitations within which I must confine these 
remarks forbid me to say more of the relations of science 
and religion than to repeat with emphasis that these two 
departments of divine knowledge can never rightly come 
into antagonism; and that with Christianity, as defined in 
the Nicene Creed, neither physical science, nor, I will add, 
intellectual science, can come into any antagonism which is 
not purely gratuitous ; since Christianity, so defined, says 
just as little of any matter of physical or intellectual science 
as of mathematics or philology. 

I come now to the innumerable difficulties which have 
attended recent studies and investigations in Biblical Criti- 
cism; and here, at the very outset, I must ask you not to 
misunderstand me. I do not profess to be a competent 
critic of the Holy Scriptures. I do not profess, therefore, 
to be a competent critic of the critics. I confess that I 
have been led to believe that what are called — somewhat 
prematurely, perhaps — the results of modern criticism, are 
partly true. I am prepared to admit, for instance, that the 
Pentateuch is a composite work of various origin and that 
it was not all, nor nearly all, written, nor even compiled, 
by Moses. I am prepared to admit that there were proba- 
bly two Isaiahs, and not only one. I am prepared to ad- 
mit that the closing verses of the Gospel according to St 
Mark are a late addition to the original Gospel. I am pre- 



94 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE, 

pared to admit that passages, such as that which contains 
the beautiful story of the woman taken in adultery, may 
have been interpolated in other Gospels. I am very sure 
that I John v. 7, is a scandalous interpolation. On the 
other hand, there are very many things of which I am by no 
means so sure as the critics profess to be, and I have seen 
reason to change my opinion of some things in which I 
formerly followed then. For example, at one time, and 
for a long time, I believed the Johannean authorship of 
the Fourth Gospel to be a great deal worse than doubt- 
ful; whereas, after a careful perusal of Dr. Watson's noble 
Bampton Lectures on that subject, I am now fully per- 
suaded that the authorship of the Fourth Gospel is as 
certain as that of any of the others. These remarks will 
suffice, I trust, to show that, while I am not eager to adopt 
rash conclusions concerning the Scriptures, I am not pre- 
pared to reject conclusions in which competent scholars 
are agreed, though they may not accord with the traditional 
opinions in which I was brought up. Most assuredly I do 
not defend the presumptuous " free handling " of the Bible 
by which some men, who are anything but competent 
critics, have secured to themselves a brief and unenviable 
notoriety; but neither have I any admiration of the timidity 
which shrinks from getting at the truth of the Bible, what- 
ever it may be. For my part, I want nothing else than the 
truth about it. The clearer that truth is made, the better 
we shall understand the Bible, and the more we shall profit 
by it. Hence I am not indifferent to the course of criti- 
cal inquiry. I am deeply and intensely interested in it — 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE, 95 

far more deeply and intensely than in any investigations of 
physical science, because the subject of it is of such un- 
speakably sacred importance. But I am utterly and abso- 
lutely indifferent to the results to which veracious criticism 
may lead, provided only that the criticism be so thorough 
and so veracious that the results, when reached, may be 
trustworthy. Whatever those results shall be, I have not 
the slightest fear of them, because, if all the most destruc- 
tive results of biblical criticism were to be proved beyond 
dispute, the Christian religion, as defined in the Nicene 
Creed, would remain not only unscathed but untouched. 
That is the point to which I wish now to call your atten- 
tion. 

I do not wonder at the consternation with which the 
slightest assured results of biblical criticism have been 
received by Christian people who have been trained to 
believe in the extreme rabbinical theory of the verbal 
inspiration of the whole Bible in all its parts. That theory 
has no warrant in the Scripture itself; it was never formulated 
by the Catholic Church; it was not known to the Fathers 
of the Church; it was repudiated by the schoolmen of the 
middle ages; it was not set forth by any reformed Church in 
the sixteenth century; the discoveries of science have proved 
it to be untenable; textual criticism has shivered it to atoms; 
the higher criticism treats it with just disdain. The mis- 
fortune is that many Christian people have been educated to 
believe that the truth of Christianity depends upon the truth 
of that unfounded theory, and when the theory falls, their 
faith in Christianity falls with it. The case of Bishop 



96 TEE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

Colenso is an instructive one. He had been brought up to 
believe the theory of verbal inspiration. It seems never to 
have occurred to him that Christianity could be true if that 
theory was not true. The questions of **an intelligent 
Zulu" set him to thinking of certain statements which are 
contained in the Pentateuch. Being a trained mathematician 
and in no sense of the word a theologian, he set about an 
examination of the figures in the Book of Numbers, and was 
soon convinced that they were hopelessly wrong. Not only 
did they involve what he considered to be physical impos- 
sibilities, but they did not even agree with each other. 
Then he made calculations of the amount of water that 
would be required to cover the whole earth to the height of 
Mount Ararat, and satisfied himself that the story of Noah's 
flood, as he understood it, was erroneous. But if there was 
error in the figures of Numbers and error in the history of 
Genesis, what became of the infallible correctness of the 
statements of the Bible } If the Bible was not infallibly 
correct in every particular, what was to become of its 
(verbal) inspiration .? And if the Bible was not (verbally) 
inspired, what became of Christianity .? What did become 
of all three in Colenso's case was that he threw them all to 
the winds, and, while holding the office of a Bishop in a 
Christian Church, he renounced his faith in Jesus Christ as 
the Son of God. The experience of Colenso has often been 
repeated. Over and over again persons- who have been 
taught to believe that the truth of Christianity depends upon 
the verbal inspiration of the Bible have been jeered out of 
both by such writers as Tom Paine or by peripatetic 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 97 



lecturers on "the mistakes of Moses," who are themselves 
victims of that same fatal misapprehension. I can imagine 
that a sharp investigation of some of those alleged "mis- 
takes " might be a suitable subject for a course of lectures 
on this foundation, and it would surely end by proving that 
Moses, or whoever else may have written any part of the 
Pentateuch, knew more of his subject than any of his critics. 
That, however, is no part of the present subject. What I 
have to show is that if all those fearful allegations were 
true, it would make not one particle of difference to 
Christianity. 

Considering the immense importance which has been at- 
tached in recent times to questions of biblical criticism, it 
is an amazing relief to find how little such questions were 
regarded in the Primitive Church. The very difficulty of 
proving the origin of the books of the New Testament from 
the scattered references to them, and the rather loose quo- 
tations from them, which are found in early Christian au- 
thors shows how lightly many matters were regarded in 
those times which are now deemed to be of supreme impor- 
tance. The whole testimony of antiquity concurs at least 
in this, that the Books of Holy Scripture were regarded 
rather as means to faith than as objects of faith. For gen- 
erations different Churches had different parts of Holy 
Scripture, while few of them had all; but all of them pos- 
sessed and held the Christian, Faith. We saw in our last 
lecture that, when catalogues of the Sacred Writings came 
to be set forth by different Churches, those catalogues were 
not identical; that no consentient action of the Universal 



98 THE CHALCEDONIAN' DECREE. 

Church has ever, to this day, settled the canon of Holy 
Scripture for all Christendom; that the canon of the Roman 
Church was not finally settled until the sixteenth century; 
that the canon of the Anglican Church, which was settled a 
few years later, was not identical with the Roman; and that 
the canon of the Greek Church differed from both until 
near the close of the seventeenth century. These facts 
alone show how completely independent the Christian re- 
ligion must be of any and every result to which the most 
searching criticism of the Scriptures can ever lead. A re- 
ligion which endured the trial of fiery persecution for ages 
before one single province had determined for itself the 
number or the names of the Books to be recognized as 
Holy Scripture, a religion which never to this day has set- 
tled that primary question with unanimity, a religion which 
has never committed itself to any statement of the author- 
ship of those Books nor to any critical account of their con- 
tents — such a religion cannot in common reason be held to 
depend upon the truth or falsehood of any theory of inspi- 
ration, and still less can it be overthrown or unsettled by 
critical discoveries which can contradict absolutely nothing 
it has ever said. The theory of verbal inspiration, whether 
it stands or falls, is no part of Christianity; and no real or 
supposed discoveries of critics concerning the date, or the 
authorship, or the composition of the Scriptures either does 
or can conflict with the Christian Faith, as contained in the 
Nicene Creed, since that creed says not one word on any 
one of those subjects. 

What the Nicene Creed really does, and all that it does, 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 99 

is to affirm the fact of inspiration in the pregnant saying 
that the Holy Ghost " spake by the prophets." This is the 
more remarkable, and the more emphatic in its significance, 
when we reflect that various theories of inspiration were 
already prevalent, and that the Church declined to recog- 
nize any one of them as exclusively Christian. The early 
Christian writers constantly referred to the Scriptures of the 
Old and New Testaments as authoritative sources of divine 
knowledge, but it is impossible to gather from them any 
one consistent theory of inspiration. Origen was more 
precise. He declared that the plenitude of inspiration was 
such as to protect the sacred writers from any lapse of 
memory and from any error or superfluity; and when he 
found himself unable to reconcile the literal statements of 
Scripture with that theory, he escaped from the difficulty 
by treating them as allegories. In general the Church re- 
garded Holy Scripture as primarily an edifying source of 
information. ''The Scriptures edified because they in- 
structed. " There was no question anywhere of the fact of 
inspiration. Rather there was a tendency to recognize the 
operation of the enabling Spirit everywhere — the Spirit of 
Truth in the writers of the sacred word, enabling them to 
tell the truth; the Spirit of Understanding in the reader, 
enabling him to apprehend the truth; and the Spirit of Wis- 
dom in the whole body of the Church, enabling it to dis- 
criminate the very and essential truth of Christ from matters 
of less moment, which sects and individuals might imagine, 
rightly or wrongly, to be taught in Holy Scripture. These 
were pious and permissible beliefs, and the Church forbade 



100 THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

none of them; but neither did it see fit to define any of 
them, lest perchance it might seem to exclude some other 
true though partial apprehension of the operation of the 
Life-Giving Spirit of God. Under the old dispensation 
that Spirit spake in many partial and various ways to the 
fathers in the prophets. Which of these would it be lawful 
. to exclude by a new-fangled theory of inspiration .? Under 
the new covenant that one and the self-same Spirit divideth 
to every man severally as He will, and it is by His holy in- 
spiration that we are now enabled to think those things that 
are right. Who would presume to set up a theory of inspi- 
ration which would virtually deny that the various and par- 
tial inspirations of ''the Holy Ghost who spake by the 
prophets " were generically different from the diversities of 
gifts by which that one and self-same Spirit now guides and 
inspires Christ's Church and its members .'' In the hard and 
fast theories of inspiration which have prevailed in modern 
times nothing is so pitiful as the unconscious but real as- 
sumption that the Holy Ghost, which spake of old to the 
fathers in the prophets, speaks no more in that new and 
fuller dispensation of the Spirit which our Saviour promised; 
and nothing in it is so profanely presumptuous as its un- 
conscious and unintended, but unequivocal, contradiction 
of our Lord Himself, Who declared that while the fact of 
inspiration may be seen in its effects, its nature is inscrut- 
able, and consequently undefinable. "The wind (He said) 
bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound there- 
of, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth: 
so is every one that is born of the Spirit." The Church of 



THE CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 101 

Christ was right, then, in refusing to define the nature of 
inspiration, either in the Holy Scriptures or elsewhere. At 
all events, it did not define the nature of inspiration; it 
was content to profess its faith in the Holy Ghost, the 
Giver of all life, physical and spiritual, Who of old times 
spake in many strange ways, such as dreams and visions, 
to the fathers through the prophets, and whose constant 
presence — not for one age, but through all ages — Jesus 
Christ has promised to His Church. Our conclusion, 
therefore, is that no theory of inspiration either is or ought 
to be any part of Christianity; and that objections to Chris- 
tianity which are founded, explicitly or implicitly, on any 
such theory, are utterly irrelevant. Hence all the difficul- 
ties created by the real or imaginary discoveries, and by the 
sound or unsound conclusions, of biblical critics, since 
they are difficulties only because of some preconceived theory 
of inspiration, may very properly cause reasonable doubts 
of that theory; but they involve no question of the Chris- 
tian religion, which is bound up with no theory on that 
subject. 

I know not how the thoughts which I have put before 
you may strike your minds; but to not a few troubled minds 
in these times it may come almost as a light from heaven, 
dispelling many a gloomy shade of doubt and difficulty, to 
learn that no past, present or possible discovery, whether 
of science or criticism, can cast one particle of doubt upon 
the Christian Faith as that Faith has been set forth and de- 
fined by the only competent authority, that is, by the voice 
of universal Christendom. There is more light of the same 



102 ^-^^ CHALCEDONIAN DECREE. 

sort to be had from the same source, and some of it I shall 
hope to show you in the next lecture. Meanwhile, and be- 
fore proceeding further, may I not ask you to admit that 
the Chalcedonian Decree, so far as we have yet considered 
it, was no tyrannical encroachment on the lawful freedom 
of the individual Christian, but stands vindicated in this 
nineteenth century as a truly constitutional and catholic law 
of light and liberty ? 



LECTURE IV. 
THE NICENE CREED. 



LECTURE IV. 
THE NICENE CREED. 

UNDER THE DECREE OF CHALCEDON THEORIES OF PREDESTI- 
NATION, SOTERIOLOGY, SPIRITUAL OPERATION, SACRAMEN- 
TAL GRACE AND ETERNAL JUDGMENT ARE NO PART OF 
CHRISTIANITY. SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF THE CREED DOES 
NOT VOID ITS PLAIN SIGNIFICANCE. THE CONCEPTION AND 
RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. THE CHURCH AS UNDERSTOOD 
IN THE CREED. POSITION OF THE LAMBETH CONFERENCE. 

God is Love.— I John iv. 8. 

God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. — I JOHN i. 5. 

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 
— John iii. 16. 

If the one [Lutheranism] was, as history shows us, in constant danger 
of antinomian developments, the other struck at the root of morality by- 
making God Himself unjust. Foi-ensic fictions of substitution, immoral 
theories of the Atonement, the rending asunder of the Trinity, and the 
opposing of the Divine Persons, like parties in a lawsuit, were the nat- 
ural corollaries of a theory which taught that God was above morality 
and man beneath it. — Rev. Aubrey Moore, M. A. 

J. S. Mill's well known words, "I will call no being good who is not 
what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures," was a 
noble assertion of immutable morality, against a religion which, alas! 
he mistook for Christianity. The conscience of to-day — and it is a real 
gain that it should be so — refuses to believe that the imprimatur of re- 
ligion can be given to that which is not good, or that God would put us 
to moral confusion. It would rather give up religion altogether than 
accept one which will not indorse and advance our highest moral ideas. 
— Ibid. 

105 



106 THE NICENE CREED, 



In religion, 
What damned error but some sober brow 
Will bless it and approve it with a text, 
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament. — Shakspeare. 
First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator; hoping 
.and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my 
Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting. — Shakspeare's Will. 
In the early Church, the careful distinction which later times have 
made between Baptism, Regeneration, Conversion and Repentance, did 
not exist. They all meant the same thing. — Dean Stanley. 

I do not know whether I shall live again on earth or elsewhere; 
whether I shall be a being of three dimensions or four, or of no dimen- 
sions at all; whether I shall be in space or out of space. It is far better 
to give up speculations about accidental trifles, such as these; for acci- 
dents they are as compared with the essence of the second life, which 
consists in love. — E. A. Abbott. 

My own dim life should teach me this, 

That life shall live forevermore; 

Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is. 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 

Thou madest man, he knows not why; 
He thinks he was not made to die; 

And Thou hast made him: Thou art just. — TENNYSON. 

We have seen that no discovery of science, and no theory 
which can properly be called a scientific theory, conflicts, 
or ever can conflict, with Nicene Christianity. We have 
also seen that while a veracious criticism of the Holy 
Scriptures may indeed upset some modern theories of in- 
spiration, they cannot disturb the Christian Faith, which is 
bound up with no theories on that subject. I have next 
to show that Christianity is not in the least responsible for 
certain other doctrinal beliefs which have been unwarranta- 
bly connected with it, and have greatly added to its difficul- 



THE NICENE CREED. 107 

ties by making it either incredible to the intellect or repug- 
nant to the conscience. 

The first of these is the modern doctrine of predestina- 
tion. It is commonly supposed to be founded on certain 
discourses, of St. Paul, and yet, strange as it may seem, 
those discourses, for centuries after they were written, do 
not appear to have been understood in the sense in which 
they have more recently been taken. The originator of the 
later doctrine of predestination was St. Augustine, one of 
the greatest, if not the very greatest, of the Fathers of the 
Church, who, nevertheless, by his teaching of that doctrine, 
poisoned and corrupted the religion he professed. In his 
early life St. Augustine had been a Manichean, believing, 
like other followers of Mani, that the universe is governed, 
not by one living and true God, but simultaneously by a 
God of Light and by another God of Darkness, who are en- 
gaged in an eternal conflict with each other. On his con- 
version to Christianity Augustine unconsciously retained 
not a little of the gloom of his original Manicheism; and, 
with the consistency of a remorseless logic, he did not hesi- 
tate to attribute to the God of Light Whom He adored a 
cruelty which were worthier to be ascribed to the God of 
Darkness whom he abhorred. Bad as Augustinian predes- 
tinarianism was, however, it was not so consistently dread- 
ful as the later system of Calvin, which makes the salvation 
of men to depend upon an immutable decree of God, issu- 
ing solely from His eternalwill before the foundations of 
the world were laid, and predicated on no divine foresight 
of the faith or good works of those who are saved. In the 



108 THE NICENE CREED. 

fulness of time the elect are effectually called into a state 
of salvation; without regard to their conduct, they are ac- 
counted righteous; without regard to their personal dispo- 
sition, they are constrained to continue i'n the way of salva- 
tion; and at last they are entirely sanctified and admitted 
to eternal glory. If the Calvinistic doctrine stopped 
there, it would reduce every human being who is saved to 
the condition of a spiritual automaton, irresistibly con- 
trolled by a Power exterior to itself; but at least the con- 
trolling Power could not be called cruel or unjust. Calvin- 
ism, however, does not stop there. It declares that from 
all eternity the number of the elect has been unchangeably 
fixed by the decree of God and can be neither increased nor 
diminished; so that no man who is not predestined to 
eternal life can possibly be saved, however he may live or 
die. From all eternity the reprobate man has been foreor- 
dained to be born into a fallen state of being, from the mo- 
ment of his birth to lie under God's wrath and curse, to be 
liable to all the miseries of life and death, and at last to fall 
into the pains of hell forever. All this, remember, is sup- 
posed to happen because God has chosen of His own will 
to have it so. A man is saved or damned simply because 
God wills and irresistibly decrees that he shall be saved or 
damned; and God is supposed to will and decree the salva- 
tion of some and the damnation of others merely to please 
Himself 

Now, I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that if 
this doctrine were any part of Christianity, I should renounce 
Christianity forthwith as immensely worse than atheism. It 



THE NICENE CREED. 109 



is better not to believe in God than to believe Him to be 
inconceivably and capriciously malignant; better a thousand 
times to embrace agnosticism than to believe God to be an 
almighty demon. Yet millions of Christian people have 
gone through the world fancying that they believed these 
slanders against God, and many millions more have theo- 
retically or practically renounced Christianity because they 
believed it to be responsible for them. If you ask some 
of the most virulent enemies of Christianity what makes 
their hatred so embittered, I believe you will find that it is 
this doctrine of predestination and another doctrine of a 
similar sort which have made Christianity not only incredible 
to their intellect but repulsive to their sense of justice. 

In view of these facts it is something of a relief to be as- 
sured that neither the Augustinian nor the modern doctrine 
of predestination is any part of Christianity. Concerning 
the foreknowledge and decrees of God, as concerning His 
method of creation,— things which, from their very nature, 
are not rightly knowable, and therefore cannot be defined — 
not one single syllable is to be found in the Nicene Creed I 
But that is not all. The modern theory of election and 
reprobation is irreconcilable with the very first article of the 
Nicene Creed. That article declares that God, Who is the 
Maker of all things visible and invisible in heaven and earth, 
is not only almighty in power, but is also a Father in char- 
acter. Now, as Christ said in His teaching, "What man is 
there of you " who would deliberately bring children of his 
own into existence, for the express purpose of consigning 
them "to the pains of hell forever? " Is there a tnan on 



110 THE NICENE CREED. 

earth who would do such a thing, or entertain the though; 
of it for one single instant ? There is no such man on 
earth; and there is no such God in heaven. There is no 
such God anywhere save in the insane imaginations of men 
whom overmuch one-sided learning hath made mad, and in 
the thoughts, but never truly in the hearts, of others who 
have been misled by them. God the Father Almighty, the 
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is infinitely bet- 
ter, and not infinitely worse, than any man of you. It may 
sometime save some of you from the danger of a painful 
sort of scepticism to remember that the modern doctrine of 
predestination is no part of Christianity; but that if the Ni- 
cene Creed is true, and if the theology of Christ is true, that 
doctrine is false. 

I would not have you think, however, that because I re- 
ject that dreadful doctrine with all the moral antipathy and 
intellectual energy of which I am capable, therefore I con- 
demn those who think they hold it. Not at all. Our very 
strongest beliefs have a slighter hold upon us than we ever 
realize. Every one of us, for instance, believes, or indeed, 
we might say, he knows, that he is doomed to die; yet, 
practically, we live on as if we were to live forever, and the 
shadow of our coming doom casts no gloom on our lives. 
So, too, we think that we believe the Gospel of Christ; but 
if we only did believe it, as we think we do, how different 
we should be ! How sweetly gracious in behavior I How 
patient under provocation 1 How serene in trouble ! How 
loving to our friends ! How magnanimous to enemies ! 
How Ivotherly to all men ! How little we should dread 



THE NICENE CREED. m 



death ! How hopefully we should expect the day on which, 
for us, eternal life shall dawn ! If we only half believed in 
Christ as we say we do and think we do, we should be far 
more like Him than we ever are. The trouble is that we be- 
lieve in Him with the mind far more than with the heart : 
and it is with the heart that a man believeth unto righteous- 
ness. Just so, it is with the heart that men believe unto un- 
righteousness. If a man is brought up to believe a false 
and cruel doctrine, it does not always follow that the doc- 
trine will make him cruel, though that, undoubtedly, is its 
natural effect. Other doctrines of a contrary nature may so 
completely overshadow the false and cruel doctrine that he 
shall hardly realize it intellectually and never at all appro- 
priate it heartily. There is not a living man to-day in this 
world, however strongly he may think he holds the Calvinis- 
tic system, who would not be glad at heart to disbelieve it. 
So far as he does believe it, he believes it only with his 
mind. No living man either does or can believe it with his 
heart. Meanwhile a thousand influences of Christianity 
combine to countervail the influence of the unloved and 
unlovely doctrine. The Fatherhood of God is all against it. 
Every honest proclamation of the Gospel is inconsistent 
with it. The Sermon on the Mount is a categorical contra- 
diction of it. The common instincts of justice, humanity, 
benevolence, are fatal to it; for no man can really believe 
that God is less just, less humane, less benevolent, than he 
himself is; and no man can really or heartily believe that a 
vast majority of his fellowmen, to whom he himself is bound 
to be just, humane and pitiful, have been arbitrarily doomed 



112 THE NICENE CREED. 

by God Almighty to a horrible fate which outrages every in- 
stinct of justice, humanity and mercy. Hence, I, for one, 
do not believe that any man on this earth believes the doc- 
trines of predestination to which I have referred. Any man 
who should undertake in this age of the world to preach 
them, as Jonathan Edwards preached them, though he 
should do it with an agony of soul as manifest as that of 
Edwards was, would drive his congregation from him in 
horror and amazement. Be that, however, as it may, it is 
your privilege and mine to know that those doctrines are no 
part of Christianity, but, on the contrary, that they are plainly 
inconsistent with the very first foundation article of the Chris- 
tian Faith. 

When we consider the endless controversies of mediaeval 
and modern theologians concerning the divine means and 
method o£ human salvation, it is truly humbling and most 
instructive to turn to the sublime simplicity of the Nicene 
Creed. In popular theology one often finds something like 
a controversy between the persons of the Godhead, the 
Father standing as an impersonation of inexorable ven- 
geance, and the Son as an impersonation of infinite good- 
ness and divine compassion. Now, in the unity of the 
Godaead, there can be no such opposition of character. 
If there were, the unity of God would be destroyed. There 
would be two Gods or three Gods; there could no longer 
be one God. The truth is that popular theology contains 
in it a large amount of unconscious Manicheism, and offers 
to popular faith one God to be dreaded and another God 



THE NICENE CREED. 113 



to be loved. Naturally that theology takes little note of 
the great Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. It looks 
not only chiefly but exclusively at the death of Christ, as if 
the hiding of His Godhead in a form of clay must not have 
been as great a sacrifice as the death which it contemplated, 
and by which He was at length released from His assumed 
condition of humiliation In the Nicene Creed there is no 
such dividing of the Godhead, no such partial and unsatis- 
factory apprehension of the atonement of Christ, nor any 
attempt whatever to devise a philosophical theory concern- 
ing it. There is no exaltation of the Incarnation, so as to 
make the death and passion of our Lord merely an incident 
of the Incarnation; neither is the mystery of the Incarnation 
represented as a merely introductory step to the sacrifice of 
Calvary. The Nicene Creed states the whole truth, and 
states it without one syllable of interpretation which our 
Lord and His Apostles withheld. It exalts nothing beyond 
measure, and depresses nothing from its due importance. 
*' For us men and for our salvation (5z ?//<«? n.r.X.^^'' it says 
"He came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the 
Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, and was made Man; for 
our sakes {ynip ?//<G3'y) He was crucified under Pontius Pi- 
late, and sufi'ered, and was buried, and rose again the third 
day according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, 
and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; (for our sakes) 
He Cometh again with glory to judge the living and the 
dead." From first to last it is all " for us men and for our 
salvation; " in all the marvelous whole and in each particu- 
lar of the whole, it was, and is, and is to be " for our sakes." 



114 THE NICENE CREED. 

What an amazing contrast have we here to the endless intel- 
lectual muddle, the pretentious jargon and the arrogant ab- 
surdities of individual doctors, sects and churches that have 
undertaken to be wiser than the universal Church of Christ ! 
Theories of the plan of salvation have cleared away no dif- 
ficulties; they have made many. Some of the most effect- 
ive and profane assaults that have ever been made upon 
Christianity have been grounded upon one or other of those 
theories; so that one might well hesitate before concluding 
whether those assaults, or the unauthorized theories which 
made them possible, are the more profane. I think it, 
therefore, necessary to insist that any theory whatever, and 
whether it be true or false, which pretends to pass one line 
beyond the limits of the reverent reserve of the Nicene Creed, 
is no part of Christianity, and is only too likely to be both 
untrue and presumptuously profane. 

Precisely the same remark must be made concerning un- 
uthorized theories of the operations of the Holy Spirit in 
the souls of individual men. It is our Saviour Hmiself, as 
we have seen, Who declares the operations of God's Spirit 
to be inscrutable, and consequently as undefinable as they 
are real and manifest. What volumes of controversy have 
there not been written on justification, adoption and sanc- 
tification ! And after all, it has been justly said that the 
difference between the Roman doctrine and the Lutheran 
doctrine of justification is only the difi"erence between a 
quce and a qua. For my part, I care as little for the qucB 
as for the qua. There is a sense in which I could believe 



THE NICENE CREED, 115 

the one or the other; consequently, there is a sense in 
which I believe both; and if I believed neither of the two, 
and had never heard of them, it would make not one parti- 
cle of difference to Christianity, which knows neither of 
them, nor to my spiritual condition, which they do not af- 
fect. It is not botany that makes the flower to spring or that 
gives its fragrance; and it is not theology that makes the 
gift of God's grace. Botany tells things which are ob- 
served; but when theology attempts to tell the things of the 
Spirit, it attempts to tell what cannot be directly observed 
nor scientifically defined. 

The Catholic Church of Christ, speaking in the language 
of the Nicene Creed, falls into no such absurdity. It adores 
the Holy Spirit as the Lord and Lifegiver, but it does not 
attempt to parcel out and label His ineffable Gifts, nor does 
it authorize others so to do. It has no mechanical theory, 
for instance, of a conversion which, when it once takes place, 
can never be repeated. It understands that all men who have 
erred and strayed from God's ways like lost sheep must, with- 
out exception, repent and be converted, that their sins may 
be blotted out. Without exception, I repeat; and therefore, 
since there is no man who does not daily err from God's way, 
there can be no man who does not need to be converted every 
day of his life. It is all a question of degree, and no defini- 
tions that the mind of man could frame or conceive would be 
sufficient to include all varieties and all degrees of human 
necessity and divine grace. Consequently, the Church of 
Christ sets forward no Procrustean bed of spiritual measure- 
ment, to the dimensions of which every soul must be stretched 



116 THE NICENEXREED. 

or crushed. It demands of no man that he shall repeat the 
spiritual experience of another man. John Bunyan's Chris- 
tian had his Slough of Despond, and his Hill of Difficulty; 
he lingered happy days in the Interpreter's House, groaned 
in the dungeon of Doubting Castle, and had a far-off view 
of the Delectable Mountains, before he crossed the narrow 
stream which lies this side of the Celestial City. All these 
things were true for Christian, that is, for John Bunyan, and 
for many others. But they are not true for all men. There 
are blessed souls who never floundered through any slough 
of despond, and never had one single battle with Giant De- 
spair, but who go their happy way through life, trusting with- 
out doubt in their Father's love. Some there are to whom 
the grace of wisdom makes the whole world one great House 
of the Divine Interpreter, in which they learn lessons of truth 
from day to day. There are some before whose eyes no vis- 
ion of the Delectable Mountains, and no view of the Heavenly 
City ever rises on this side of the Jordan, yet who humbly 
tread the path appointed for them, and who reach their des- 
tination quite as surely as the gallant Christian of John Bun- 
van's holy dream. One of the worst things in popular relig- 
ion is that it prescribes one single line of experience to all 
men, women and children indiscriminately: and nothing 
could be more absurd, unless the lives of all men, women 
and children were as identical as they are infinitely various. 
The Church of Christ does not require that men shall be- 
gin their conscious spiritual life with artificial contortions or 
with strained emotions. All men have sinned; she calls all 
men to repent and be converted. To all she promises, the 



THE NICENE CREED. \\> 



unbounded grace of God and the assistance of His Holy 
Spirit. But for instructions concerning the operations of 
the Spirit she leaves them to learn from Holy Scripture and 
their own experience. The language of Scripture, studied 
for edification, not for purposes of controversy, is both sim- 
ple and sufficient: " By grace are ye saved (it says), through 
faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God ; " 
"therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with 
God." No nicety of definition could add to the instruction 
or the comfort of such words as those. Every attempt at 
further and more minute definition has done monstrous mis- 
chief; but no such attempt has any warrant from the Catho- 
lic Church. Whenever, then, well meaning men would have 
you subject your spiritual nature to a course of frames and 
feelings to which you know it would not be possible for you 
to subject yourself sincerely, do not hesitate to refuse with 
energy. At all events maintain your own integrity of soul; 
because, if once you part with that, you can trust your own 
sincerity no more. If they call you to be converted, and 
thrust theories of conversion upon you, heed their call, *but 
reject their theories. Turn away from every wrong thing 
you have fallen into; turn with all your heart to God your 
Saviour. But take no man's theory of the operations of the 
Holy Spirit; or if you do, then hold your theory with mod- 
esty, remembering that it is no part of Christianity, and that 
though it may be true for your particular case and many 
other cases like your own, it may be just as false for many 
others. There is many a benighted soul wandering this day 
in reckless and resentful unbelief because it has once or of- 



118 THE XICEXE CREED 

tener pinned its faith to some crude theory of popular emo- 
tional religion, which it has practically tried and found to 
be a vain illusion. So do idle and unwarranted theories of 
Christianity become the fatal cause of bitterly resentful hatred 
of the truth which they were truly and sincerely, but un- 
wisely and ignorantly, meant to serve. 

They are many who might learn a lesson of humility from 
the reverent silence of the Catholic Church concerninsr the 
sacred mystery of sacramental grace. The Xicene Creed 
asserts the reality of sacramental grace in the acknowledg- 
ment of ''One Baptism for the remission of sins;" but 
there it stops. The divine mystery and the unspeakable 
gift of the Holy Eucharist it does not define. The un- 
broken tradition and the universal custom of every branch 
of the Catholic Church has regarded the Holy Eucharist as 
chief among the age?ida of the Church, the liturgy and its 
accessories (until recently in the Roman Communion alone) 
being left to the discrimination of each particular Church; 
but no definition of credenda concerning it is set forth in 
the Catholic Symbol. This is a very remarkable fact con- 
cerning which more than a few observations might well be 
made. Enough that it is a fact, which should teach us at 
least three things: ist, to be cautious in forming opinions 
of the doctrine of the Sacraments; 2d. to be yet more care- 
ful not to set forth any opinions we may have formed as if 
they were catholic truth: and. 3d, always and everywhere 
to resist and deny the pretense that exact modern defini- 
tions, by whomsoever set forth, have the slightest color of 
catholic authority. 



THE NICENE CREED. 119 

I have now to note a seventh topic on which the Catholic 
Church did not define, but which has recently engaged the 
minds of men to a great extent. It is astonishing that on 
the subject of Eschatology, concerning which whole libraries 
have been printed, the Catholic Faith gives us in the Greek 
original only fourteen words, in which it declares that our 
Lord Jesus Christ " cometh again with glory to judge both 
the quick and the dead," and affirms that ** we look for the 
resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." 
Once again we are compelled to contrast the simplicity and 
reserve of the Catholic Church with the volubility of arrogant 
dogmatism displayed by vastly less respectable authorities. 
On the subject of future rewards and punishments the 
abundance of assertion has been in inverse ratio to the 
littleness of our knowledge. The docirina Romanensium, or 
the vulgar Romanism of the middle age, went wild in its 
horrible declarations concerning the state of the lost; and 
the vulgar Protestantism of later times bated nothing of the 
Romish horrors; indeed it made them worse, by denying the 
existence of a purgatory, which, in the Romish system, left 
some chance of escape. From the cruel atrocity of Romish 
and Protestant doctrine concerning the last things, the com- 
mon sense and instinct of mankind have justly recoiled; and 
I believe that it has been the horror of those abominable and 
unauthorized teachings, more than any other one thing, 
which has caused a multitude of men to renounce Chris- 
tianity altogether. Of late years the recklessness of denial 
has been almost as remarkable, though not, assuredly, so 
atrocious, as the former recklessness of assertion. Now, 



120 THE NICENE CREED. 



there is declared to be neither hell nor purgatory, nor any 
judgment at all worth thinking of. The reaction has cer- 
tainly been extensive and radical; but Catholic Christians 
ought not to be swayed to the one extreme nor to the other. 
They cannot pretend to make void the words of Scripture, 
that ** whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 
They cannot pretend that the tremendous word aionios, the 
significance of which transcends imagination, really means 
nothing of any consequence. But, on the other hand, they 
cannot transfer to eternity the conditions of time, nor ap- 
ply to its unfathomable mysteries a terminology which is 
appropriate to time conditions only. Here we may adopt 
the language used by Bishop Wilberforce in interpreting the 
views of Frederick Denison Maurice, which Bishop Wilber- 
force seems to have approved. He says : ' ' To represent God 
as revenging upon His creatures by torments through never- 
ending extensions of time their sinful acts committed here 
is (i) unwarrantably to transfer to the eternal world the 
conditions of this world. For time is of this world; and 
eternity is not time prolonged, but, rather, time abolished; 
and it is therefore logically incorrect to substitute in the 
Scriptural proposition for ' eternal death ' * punishment ex- 
tended through a never-ending duration of time; ' and (2), 
as this is unwarranted, so it is dangerous; {a) because by 
transferring our earthly notions of such prolonged vengeance 
to God, it misrepresents His character, {b) because as men 
recoil from applying to themselves or to others such a sen- 
tence, it leads to the introduction of unwarranted pallia- 
tives which practically explain away the true evil and fatal 
consequences of sin. " 



THE NICENE CREED. .121 

These views, like many others on the same subject, do 
not cover the whole ground. How should they ? The 
whole ground is eternity ; and while Maurice and Wilber- 
force may err in saying that ''eternity is time abolished," 
yet at least eternity is not time, but beyond time and time 
conditions. What time is, no man knows; of its conditions 
relatively to ourselves we know something; of eternity and 
its conditions we know nothing. A man would be foolish 
to attempt to discourse of biology in the terms of mechan- 
ics; but far more foolish is he who attempts to discourse of 
eternity in the terms of time. When our Saviour spoke of 
eternal life, He did not speak in any such terms. He said, 
"This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and 
Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent." What, then, must 
eternal death be but to lose that knowledge .? To lose the 
very thought of God; to lose the very recollection of Christ's 
Name; with that loss, to lose all that they include ; to lose 
the sense of good, of truth, of beauty; consequently to be- 
come involved in unimagined evils, falsehoods, foulnesses, 
all springing from oneself to blight, to blind, to horrify. I 
marvel that those who love to maintain the doctrine of ever- 
lasting punishment should be so deficient in imagination 
as to dwell on torments artificially inflicted, when eternal 
death, that true perdition, the loss of God, must result in 
torments from within worse than the worst that could come 
from without. It is a dreadful subject when we make the 
best of it ; but above every creature in the universe is "God 
the Father Almighty," who willeth not that any should per- 
ish, and whose loving kindness is over all His works. If 



122 THE NICENE CREED. 

we ascend into heaven He is there ; if we make our bed in 
hell, behold He is there also ! In the hand of God the 
Father Almighty the Nicene Creed leaves the whole subject 
of eternity, simply teaching us to look for the resurrection 
of the dead and the life of the world to come. Let us not 
fail to remember that modern theories of the future life, 
whether they are revolting from their frightful ingenuity, or 
morally enervating from their lack of seriousness, are no 
part of Christianity. 

In what has just been said of the impossibility of trans- 
ferring to eterniiy the terminology which is appropriate to 
time only, I have suggested to you the ground of a distinc- 
tion betwf^en the articles of the Creed, which I shall now 
endeavor to make clear to you. In my first lecture I re- 
ferred to the popular notion that the essential articles of 
the Christian Faith, that is, as we now understand, of that 
Faith as defined in the Nicene Creed, are all propounded in 
the same dogmatic way, and are all intended to be held in 
the same way. In that lecture I went so far as to say that 
nothing could be further from the truth. I said that the 
dogmas of the Christian Faith are few; and that statement, "I 
submit to you, has been sufficiently proved, since every one 
of those dogmas is contained in so brief a formula as the 
Nicene Creed. But I said further that these comparative- 
ly few dogmas are diff"erent in character, and that some of 
them are not pure dogmas at all, but illustrative paraboli- 
cal suggestions of divine truths which human language can- 
not perfectly express, because imperfect human reason can- 



THE NICENE CREED. 123 

not perfectly comprehend them. I think you will have no 
difficulty in perceiving the justice of this statement, if you 
observe the plain fact that the declarations of the Nicene 
Creed fall within three distinct categories. The first of 
these contains statements of eternal truths, that is of truths 
existing from eternity and in eternity ; the second contains 
statements of facts which have occurred, or are yet to oc- 
cur, in time; and the third includes statements which relate 
both to time and to eternity. Manifestly, since all our lan- 
guage is the language of time, whatever we say concerning 
eternal Persons or eternal operations must be said imper- 
fectly, or, in other words, it can be only suggestively, not 
literally and exactly, true. This subject is indeed most 
difficult ; and I should not venture to speak of it, if I did 
not know that not a little scepticism is caused by a misun- 
derstanding of it, or rather by a misconception of it. Let 
me endeavor, then, as simply as 1 can, to explain what I 
believe to be the truth of it, and this I shall do perhaps to 
most advantage by showing how completely men fail, and 
must fail, in every attempt to define what is eternal in the 
terms of time. 

Whenever men undertake to define the one only Eternal 
Being, they insensibly fall into the language of negation. A 
striking instance of this is the definition of the Westmin- 
ster Assembly's Catechism, in which God is defined to be 
*' a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, 
in wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth." 
Now, this is sublime ; but if we remember that we do not 
know what a Spirit is, but only that it is not a material be- 



124 'THE NICENE CREED. 

ing, and if we remember that by eternal we simply mean not 
temporal, that is, not limited by time conditions, the whole 
proposition becomes one continuous negation from begin- 
ning to end. Its meaning is this: that God is 7iot a mate- 
rial being, that He is not subject to conditions of space or 
time, that He is not capable of mutation, and that all these 
negations apply at once to Himself and to all His attributes. 
Much in the same way, the First of the Thirty Nine Arti- 
cles says that God is ''without body, parts or passions ; " 
which is simply a threefold negation. IMr. Spencer himself, 
in the very act of affirming the existence of a Power beyond 
the forces and phenomena of nature, falls into a double ne- 
gation when he says that Power is "inscrutable" and that 
it is " without beginning or end." Could there be a more 
striking proof of the incapacity of human language to de- 
fine the Eternal than the fact that when men attempt to tell 
what the Eternal is, they are constrained rather to tell what 
it is not ? Nay, if they express themselves in positive terms, 
they use those terms in some exceptional and peculiar sense. 
Thus, when the Nicene Creed itself declares that God is 
"almighty," it does not mean that God can do anything 
whatsoever, as, for instance, that He can accomplish an ab- 
surdity or realize a contradiction. Thus we find that the 
only adjective applied to God by the Nicene Creed is true, 
indeed, but true in a materially qualified and restricted 
sense. 

If it be true, as it is, that we can never by searching find 
out God, it is much more certain that human speech can- 
not tell perfectly or even accurately what He is. The ut- 



THE NICENE CREED. 125 

most that is possible for us is to learn something con- 
cerning Him, and to express that something in such ap- 
proximately appropriate terms or symbols as are supplied 
by human language. I believe, for instance, that one of 
the most striking evidences of the truth of the Christian 
Faith is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as it is set forth in 
the Nicene Creed, a doctrine which, to my mind, recon- 
ciles all the science of the present age with Christianity, 
because it furnishes the missing link between them. But 
how does the Creed define the triune being of God ? Not, 
most assuredly, in such a string of paradoxes as we find in 
the so-called Athanasian Creed, nor, in a rhyming arithmet- 
ical word-puzzle, ** Three in One and One in Three," 
such as I have heard poor little children taught to sing in 
a Church Sunday School. The Nicene Creed was not 
framed to perplex but to instruct, and it teaches men to 
believe in the Triune God precisely as Christ Himself 
taught, that is, in the language of symbol. It speaks, as He 
spake, of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and what symbol- 
ism is here ! If we had here to do only with the character 
of God, the symbol of human fatherhood, in however lofty 
a sense, would fall far short of the fulness of divine benev- 
olence, and therefore, even in that sense, it would be only 
an imperfect symbol or illustration of a reality which tran- 
scends human knowledge and human understanding. But 
when we speak in the Creed of God the Father, in distinc- 
tion from God the Son, it is not of His character that we 
are speaking, but of the mode of His divine being, in 
which there is a Father, and a Son, begotten of the Father, 



126 THE NICENE CREED. 

and a Spirit proceeding from the Father. No doubt this 
language is the very best that could be chosen, since it is 
the language of our Lord Himself. Yet we must not for- 
get that it is human language; nor must we forget that it 
is the language of parabolic symbol, not the language of 
exact definition. The fatherhood known to human beings 
is part of a complex relationship between separate individ- 
uals, which has no place in the unity of God. Genera- 
tion, as it is known to men, is an operation which takes 
place in time; and when we apply that word to a fact 
existing in the Godhead, we must see that we do not fall 
into the heresy of Arius, who thought of it as an event, and 
therefore said that, since the Son is begotten of the Father, 
there must have been a time when He was begotten, and 
therefore a time, still more remote, when He was not; for- 
getting that in the eternal Godhead there is no such thing 
as an event, and no such thing as time. Just so, the word 
Spirit is a picture word in itself, and when we say that the 
Holy Spirit proceedeth from the Father, we say only half 
the truth, since the same Spirit abideth in the Father. I 
trust you will endeavor to understand that I am trying to 
remove a difficulty, surely not to make one. When I 
come to our next lecture, I hope to show you that the 
doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the only doctrine of God 
that is sufficient, or even credible, in these times. But 
just now I wish to impress you with the truth that the 
eternal things of God cannot be exactly defined in human 
language, and that not only the Church but our Blessed 
Lord Himself has been constrained to use the language of 



THE NICENE CREED. 127 

symbol in revealing all we know of Him in Whose Eternal 
Unity are Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In thinking of 
these symbolic words we must remember that they are 
symbols, and that these symbols are necessary because 
exact definition is not possible. If we would rightly un- 
derstand them, we must banish every thought of time, and 
strive to realize the truth of an eternal relation so intimate 
that while the Son is of the Father, and not the Father of 
the Son, their unity is perfect; and while the eternal Spirit 
proceedeth from the Father, and not contrariwise the Fa- 
ther from the Spirit, yet, neither in time nor in eternity can 
they be disunited. Never forget that the unity of God is 
the first article of the Christian Faith. We begin our con- 
fession by declaring that "we believe in one God." Re- 
member, therefore, that any conception of the Blessed Trin- 
ity which is clearly inconsistent with the indivisible unity 
of God, is ipso facto condemned as a false conception. If, 
then, it has ever seemed to you that the symbolic language 
of the Creed implies a contradiction of the unity of God, be- 
lieve me you have utterly misunderstood it, and that, per- 
haps, because you have forgotten that it is symbolical and 
illustrative, not the language of exact definition. 

While we are bound to avoid straining the symbolical 
language of the Creed lest we should impart a meaning into 
it which it was never meant to bear, we must not less care- 
fully avoid all tampering with the reality of facts which, hav- 
ing occurred in time, are capable of being plainly stated, in 
human language. There have been signs, of late, of a dis- 



128 THE NICENE CREED. 

position to deny, or to explain away, at least t\vo statements 
of fact which are plainly enunciated in the Creeds. 

When the Apostles' Creed says that the Son of God '' was 
conceived by the Holy Ghost (and) born of the Virgin 
Mary," it is silly and dishonest to pretend that this means 
nothing more than that He was conceived, as all men are, 
by the agency of vital energies which are derived from the 
Holy Ghost, the Giver of life. A Creed, like a law, must 
be interpreted consistently with the intention of the authority 
which sets it forth; and nothing is more certain than this, 
that the Churches which set forth the Apostles' Creed have 
always intended and still intend that pregnant sentence to 
mean that our Lord was conceived, as no mere man ever 
was, by the direct, and special intervention of the Holy 
Ghost. I can think of nothing more dishonest than to 
palter in a double sense with plain words on so sacred a 
subject. I admit that it is necessary, nay essential, to dis- 
embarrass Christianity of every needless difficulty. That, 
indeed, is no small part of the duty of the Christian apologist 
at this time. But the pretended apologist who takes away 
one fragment of the faith itself, under the pretext of re- 
moving difficulties, is no apologist, but an assailant in dis- 
guise. Let there, then, be no misapprehension of this point: 
he who denies that Jesus Christ was " conceived by the Holy 
Ghost " in the plain sense of those words as they are used in 
the Apostles' Creed, or that '' the only begotten Son of God, 
by Whom all things were made," " came down from heaven, 
and was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary," 
in the plain sense of those words, as they are used in the 
Nicene Creed, denies the Christian Faith. 



THE NICENE CREED. 129 

I am bound to be not less explicit with regard to the 
resurrection of our Lord, concerning which both the Creeds 
declare that on "the third day (after His death upon the 
cross) He rose again from the dead." It is not honest to 
interpret these words in any sense less significant than they 
obviously bear in those Creeds. That they may mean far 
more is more than possible. St. Paul declares that the body 
which is buried in the grave is like ''bare grain " sown in 
the ground; it is ^'not that body that shall be" in the 
resurrection. ''There is a natural body," he says, "and 
there is a spiritual body ; " and he tells us that the spiritual 
body of those v/ho are raised from the dead is to be made 
like unto the glorious Resurrection Body of Christ. Now, 
all we read of Christ's appearances after His resurrection 
goes to show that His Body was no longer what it had been, 
nor as it had been, before His death. It had all the powers 
and faculties of a material body. It bore unquestionable 
marks of its identity with that very Body which was crucified; 
and yet it was subject to no material disabilities or restraints. 
It is idle, and it seems to me to be as profane as idle, to 
attempt to theorize upon this subject. But to deny the fact 
of Christ's real and bodily resurrection from the dead is to 
deny more than a single article of Christianity; it is to reject 
the foundation stone on which the truth of Christ's religion 
rests. If Christ be not risen, then is Christianity an empty 
dream. 

Yet I should hardly be justified in omitting to remind you 
that in the conception of Christ, and also in His resurrection, 
there was a meeting of the temporal and the eternal; in the 



130 ^-^^ NICENE CREED. 

one case an entering of the eternal into the limitations of 
time, and space, and matter, and in the other a withdraw- 
al of the eternal from those limitations> Now, we do not 
know what time is, nor what space is, nor what matter is. 
For my part, I believe, as many others do, that time, and 
space, and matter are representative illusions, which only 
imperfectly represent realities which we can never rightly 
know in this world. Consequently I believe that alike in 
the incarnation and in the resurrection there was an ex- 
hibition of divine operations under the illusory conditions 
in the midst of which our human life is lived. I believe, 
therefore, that both of these transactions and the whole Life 
that lay between them must have been more, and must have 
meant more, than it has entered into the mind of man to 
think. In this life we must be content to know things as 
they seem. While we are men on earth, bound by time 
conditions, and informed by sense perceptions which are so 
largely illusions, we must be satisfied to know in part, and 
according to the limitations with which we are encompassed. 
It was one of the weaknesses of a strong man that made 
Matthew Arnold so constantly cry out against anthropo- 
morphism. Over and over again he moaned, ''We never 
know how anthropomorphic we are ! " What else than an- 
thropomorphic should we be } What else can we be t We 
are human beings, that is we belong to the genus homo or 
civBpoD7to<^y we can know nothing at all as it appears to crea- 
tures organized as man is. Our thoughts are all picture 
forms, that is /^op^az, of things as we perceive them. What 
else, then, can they be than anthropomorphic } Let us 



THE NICENE CREED. 131 

grant, as we surely must, that we see nothing as it is, 
that light and color, for example, are not beyond us, as we 
picture them to ourselves, but within our eyes, and nowhere 
else. Shall we therefore close our eyes and refuse to see 
things as we may and can ? Shall we refuse to study them 
because our utmost studies fall short of perfect knowledge ? 
Would Mr. Arnold have advised us to do that.? Or, in 
philosophy, would he have counselled us not to think, 
because our thoughts are necessarily founded on illusive 
sense-perceptions } It was only in religion that Mr. Arnold 
found anthropomorphism to be intolerable; but he con- 
sidered it reprehensible in men to conceive of the nature or 
operation of the Divine Spirit, after the only fashion of 
spiritual being that is known to man, that is, the spirit that 
is in himself If there be such a Divine Spirit at all, and if 
It can at all be revealed to man, then both the nature and 
the operation of that Spirit can be revealed to man only in 
such fashion as a man can apprehend. Call that appre- 
hension anthropomorphic, if you will; it is analogous to 
every other human apprehension of the universe in which 
man lives and of the things and persons it contains. So, 
returning to the Incarnation and the Resurrection of the 
Only Begotten Son of God, I do not know what these 
events were, nor how they appeared, on the other side of 
the impenetrable veil which divides time, space and matter 
from eternity; but on this side they were manifested as the 
Creeds declare. The Son of God "was incarnate of the 
Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, and was made Man, was 
crucified, dead and buried, descended into hell, and the 
third day rose again according to the Scriptures." 



132 THE NIC EN E CREED. 

If I have been at all able to carry your thoughts along 
with me, I think you must surely have understood that my 
design is not to minimize the Christian Faith in any way 
whatever, but to deepen and intensify your sense of its pro- 
found significance. When it speaks of eternal realities in 
a language of symbol borrowed from the conditions under 
which we live in this world, we are to remember that such 
language must fall very far short of the divine truth it is in- 
tended to suggest, and therefore must not be so strained as 
to belittle or belie that truth. When it speaks of sublime 
transactions, manifested to the eyes of men and yet pertain- 
ing also to eternity, we are not to think that those transac- 
tions were less than they appeared to human apprehension, 
but rather that in the eternal world they must have been 
and seemed incomparably more. And now I submit to 
you that when the same Creed speaks of a fact or an object 
which actually exists in time, it is not permissible to treat 
that fact or object in any other sense than that in which the 
framers of the Creed intended it to be understood. Hence 
when the Creed declares that one article of the Christian 
Faith is to believe "in one, holy, catholic and apostolic 
Church," I think you must admit that it is a part of Chris- 
tianity to believe at least so much as that. 

If we ask ourselves what the fathers of the Church meant 
when they professed that faith, I do not think we can go 
far astray in the answer. W^hen the Nicene Creed was set 
forth, the Catholic Church of Christ was an existing institu- 
tion which was easily identified, because there was nothing 
else in the world which pretended to be the Catholic Church. 



THE NICENE CREED. 133 

There was then one body holding everywhere the same 
faith, celebrating everywhere the same sacraments, teaching 
everywhere the same code of morals, everywhere officered 
and governed in substantially the same manner, everywhere 
claiming to be the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ ; 
and there was only one such body. Wherever a different 
faith was taught, or different rites were practised, those who 
held to the universal faith and worship were catholics, and 
those who introduced or practised novelties were not catho- 
lics. The former were in the Church; the latter had neither 
part nor lot in its affairs. Concerning the government of 
the Church there was no disagreement. With many local 
variations in subordinate matters, substantially the same con- 
stitution existed wherever the Church was found. In every 
local Church there was a bishop, and only one, surrounded 
by his presbyters and deacons, and in no Church would the 
bishop or his people have been satisfied of his ministerial au- 
thority, if they had not believed that his commission had 
been derived from men whose predecessors had been com- 
missioned by the Apostles of Christ. The ecumenical Coun- 
cils did not create these facts. They were facts for centu- 
ries before one single ecumenical council had been held. 
All that the ecumenical Councils did was to accept them 
and respect them as they were. The ecumenical Councils 
made certain regulations for the preservation of the consti- 
tution of the Church as it already existed; they neither en- 
couraged nor tolerated innovations; they refused judicially 
to change the customs of particular Churches; from the 
Council of Nicaea downwards their consistent language was, 



134 THE NICENE CREED. 

" Let the ancient customs prevail." The ecumenical Coun- 
cils would have utterly refused to authorize or sanction any- 
other constitution than that which was substantially universal 
in the Church. They would have wasted no time in asking 
whether the proposed constitution might, or might not, be 
theoretically a good one. For them it would have stood 
condemned by the single fact that it was new. They would 
simply have said, ' ' We have no such custom, neither the 
Churches of God." In the same way, if it had been pro- 
posed to dispense with any part of the universally existing 
constitution, they would have wasted no time in inquiring 
whether that part of the constitution was or was not indis- 
pensable to the being of a Church. They would simply 
have said, *'Let the ancient customs prevail." In follow- 
ing the immemorial and universal customs of the holy 
Church throughout all the w^orld, no one could take damage; 
in departing from them, no man could be sure that he was 
not making a beginning of divisions in the Body of Christ. 
It was one great misfortune of the Reformation that this 
conservatism of the ecumenical Councils was so widely for- 
gotten, and that novelties of order and organization were 
then and afterwards introduced into various Churches. 
Surely there is both warning and instruction in the fact that, 
in our own generation, one of the chief obstacles to a res- 
toration of unity amxong Christians, who have no longer any 
other cause of separation from each other, is that the fore- 
fathers of some of them, one hundred, two hundred or 
three hundred years ago, chose to adopt Church Constitu- 
tions unknown to the customs of the Holy Catholic Church 



THE NICENE CREED. X35 

at any previous epoch of its whole existence. I think we 
must admit that when a step has been taken which has 
manifestly led to ill results, it is the part of wisdom to re- 
trace that step; and therefore I think the Lambeth Confer- 
ence was wise in laying it down as one of the indispensable 
steps to Christian Unity that * ' the Historic Episcopate " 
must be everywhere accepted. In so doing the Anglican 
Bishops did what the ecumenical Councils would have done. 
Even the ecumenical Councils never pretended to dispense 
with the immemorial customs of the One, Holy, Catholic and 
Apostolic Church. All that the Bishops of the Anglican 
Communion have done is to refuse to assume a power to 
which the ecumenical Councils did not pretend. 

But here we must note another particular in which the 
Lambeth Conference most wisely followed in the footsteps 
of the ecumenical Councils. Those venerable Councils, 
when they declared it to be an article of the Christian Faith 
to believe in ''one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church," 
undoubtedly referred to the historic Church, with its historic 
constitution as a fact, and an unalterable fact, of historical 
Christianity. But in this, as in so many other things, they 
did not enter into theory; and I am thoroughly convinced 
that if they had tried to frame a theory on that subject, they 
would hopelessly have failed. At all events, they set forth 
no theory; and consequently no theory of the constitution 
of the Christian Church has one particle of authority from the 
Nicene Creed. The Lambeth Conference likewise framed 
no theory on that subject, and it is much to be regret- 
ted that some of its members; few in number and by no 



136 THE NICENE CREED. 

means conspicuous either for learning or for authority, have 
had the hardihood to publish expositions of the intention of 
that conference which are at variance with the language of 
the Conference itself. Among those who hold as strongly 
to the historic episcopate as these self-constituted expositors 
of its meaning are many who hold quite irreconcilable theo- 
ries concerning it; and if a future Lambeth Conference were 
to attempt to put forward a consistent theory of the Consti- 
tution of the Catholic Church, I venture to think that it 
would fail egregiously. I am sure that it ought to fail, be- 
cause it would be trying to do more than the Catholic 
Church itself has ever done or tried to do. It would be trying 
to erect a theory as an article of faith; and in the very act of 
seeking to promote the cause of unity, it would be raising 
an unnecessary barrier of division between Christian people. 
I have spoken of this subject at more length than I might 
otherwise have done, because I believe that it may be of 
service to you to know how truly Catholic is the position 
taken by the Lambeth Conference in reference to it, and how 
admirably it has kept within Catholic lines in standing firmly 
for the Catholic Church as that Church was known and rec- 
ognized by the ecumenical Councils, without adding one 
syllable of theory to the language of the Creeds. I have 
thought it the more necessary to do so, because I believe 
that Christian Unity will never be restored in this world on 
any other than the Chalcedonian basis of unswerving fidelity 
to the Catholic Faith and unlimited liberty in all other 
particulars; and, until Christian Unity shall be restored 
upon that basis, Christianity will lack the noblest evidence 



THE NICENE CREED. I37 

of its divine authority. It was our Lord Himself Who 
prayed " that they may all be one, that the world may be- 
lieve that Thou hast sent Me." 

It is needless to recapitulate at any great length the par- 
ticulars of the investigation of the Chalcedonian Decree 
which we have now concluded. In establishing the Nicene 
Creed as the sole and sufficient exposition of the Christian 
Faith, that decree, which the whole Christian world so sig- 
nally ratified, did not only provide a touchstone of dan- 
gerous error; it established the citadel of Christianity. It 
made Christianity unassailable on any possible ground of 
scientific discovery, or on any conceivable ground of criti- 
cal research. It excluded from it false philosophies of the 
Divine Decrees, and presumptuous doctrines of future pun- 
ishment. It set forth a summary of truths which Christ 
Himself taught concerning the Divine Being, and it mod- 
estly set forth those truths in the picture language which 
our Lord Himself had used. It told the marvellous facts 
of His Incarnation, Passion, Death, Burial, Resurrection and 
Ascension plainly, in the sober terms of historic statement, 
but without attempting to expound the hidden and eter- 
nal mysteries which those events. must beyond all doubt have 
included. It neither set forth nor allowed scientific schemes 
of the plan of salvation which is known to God alone, 
nor any hard and fast theories of the operations of divine 
grace either directly to the personal soul or mediately 
through the sacraments. And lastly, it held fast to the 
historic Church of Christ, the ark of safety to them that 



138 '^^HE NICENE CREED. 

enter it, hailing it as one, holy, catholic and apostolic, yet, 
with all this, neither pretending to define what is necessary 
to the "being of a Church nor allowing anything to be dis- 
pensed with which the ancient customs of the Universal 
Church had held and practised from the times of the Apos- 
tles. Christianity has never been improved by adding to 
the Faith as thus defined. Every unauthorized definition 
has served only to expose it to new forms of assault. In 
the present times there is good need that the Christian Faith 
should be discriminated from unauthorized additions. I 
trust that the way of strength and safety may modestly be 
recognized by those to whom the defense of the Faith has 
been committed; and the way of strength and safety has not 
now to be discovered. It was marked out many centuries 
ago by the wisdom of universal Christendom in the formu- 
lation of the Chalcedonian Decree. 



LECTURE V. 

THE GOD OF SCIENCE IS THE TRIUNE GOD OF 
CHRISTIANITY. 



LECTURE V. 

THE GOD OF SCIENCE IS THE TRIUNE GOD OF 
CHRISTIANITY, 

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. — Psalm xiv. i. 

In Him we live and move and have our being; as certain also of 
your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring. — St. Paul, 
Acts xvii. 28. 

There is one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through 
all and in you all. — Eph. iv. 6. 

No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is 
in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him. — ^John i. 18. 

The Spirit of Truth, which proceedeth from the Father. — ^John xv. 26. 

A little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism ; but depth in 
philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. — Bacon. 

No inductive conclusions are more than probable. — Jevons. 

In spite of its immense difficulty of application, and the aspersions 
which have been mistakenly cast upon it, the theory of probabilities, is 
the noblest, as it will in course of time prove perhaps the most fruitful, 
branch of mathematical science. Is is the very guide of life, and hardly 
can we take a step or make a decision of any kind without, correctly 
or incorrectly, making an estimation of probabilities. . . . The 
whole cogency of inductive reasoning, as applied to science, rests upon 
probability. — Ibid. 

What I mean by the rationality of a belief in any hypothesis is its fit- 
ness to be accepted and acted upon because it has in its favor the strong- 
est probabilities of the case, so far as we can grasp these probabilities. 
I know of no other foundation for a belief in anything; for belief is the 
acceptance by the mind of some proposition, statement, or supposed 
fact, the truth of which depends upon evidence addressed to our senses, 
or to our intellectual perceptions, or to both. — George Ticknor 
Curtis. 

141 



142 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

The one act of faith in the convert to science, is the confession of the 
universality of order, and. of the absolute vaUdity, in all times, and under 
all circumstances, of the law of causation. This confession is an act of 
faith, because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions 
is not susceptible of proof. — Huxley. 

The very rationality of the creation, in our deepest analysis and broad- 
est survey of it, leads the mind, by the conditions inseverable from its 
reasoning faculties, to see in its perfect relations the inevitable congruity 
of its intelligent Cause. And all this, be it observed, results after science 
has disclosed the splendid treasures of its knowledge, the beauty and 
indisputable accuracy of its methods, and the new senses with which it 
has endowed itself by its instruments. — Dallinger. 

It [the dissipation of energy] enables us distinctly to say that the pres- 
ent order of thmgs has not been evolved through infinite past time by 
the agency of laws now at work, but must have had a distinctive be- 
ginning, a state beyond which we are totally unable to penetrate, a 
state, in fact, which must have been produced by other than now 
[visibly] acting causes. — PROFESSOR Tait. 

If this theory [of the dissipation of heat] be true, physical science in- 
stead of giving any countenance to the notion of matter having existed 
from eternity, distinctly teaches that creation took place, that the pres- 
ent system of nature and its laws originated, at an approximately as- 
signable date in the past. — Professor Flint. 

None of the processes of nature, since the time when nature began, 
have produced the slightest difference in any molecule. We are there- 
fore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity 
of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call 
natural. On the other hand, the exact quality of each molecule to all 
others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the 
essential character of "a manufactured article," and precludes th^ idea 
of its being eternal and self-existent. — Professor Clarke Maxwell. 

Let no one imagine that, should we everpenetrate this mystery [of life], 
we shall thereby be enabled to reduce, except from life, even the lowest 
form of life. Sir W. Thompson's splendid suggestion of vortex-atoms, 
if it be correct, will make us thoroughly to understand matter and 
mathematically to investigate all its properties. Yet its very basis im- 
plies the absolute necessity of an intervention of creative power to form 
or to destroy one atom of even dead matter. — Professor Tait. 

The origin or cessation of rotation in a perfect fluid must be the effect 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 143 

of supernatural action; in other words, every vortex-atom must owe the 
rotation which gives it its individuality to a divine impulse. — Professor 
Flint. 

The physical laws may explain the inorganic world, the biological 
laws may account for the development of the organic; but of the point 
where they meet, of that strange borderland between the dead and the 
living, science is silent. It is as if God had placed everything m earth 
and heaven in the hands of nature, but reserved a point at the genesis 
of life for His direct appearing. — Drummond. 

Men of science will frankly admit their inability to point to any satis- 
factory experimental proof that life can be developed save from demon- 
strable antecedent life. — Tyndal. 

Life precedes organization. — HuXLEY. 

In the materialistic explanations of the universe, we find that the 
formula of materialism works very well until the phenomena of con- 
sciousness emerge, and then it breaks down.— Iverach. 

Another source of the conviction of the existence of God, connected 
with the reason, and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much 
more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty, or rather, im- 
possibility, of conceiving the immense and wonderful universe, includ- 
ing man, with his capacity of looking far backward and far into futurity, 
as the result of blind chance or necessity. — Darwin, Life and Letters, 
vol. i. 312. 

You have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly 
and clearly that I could have done, that the universe is not the result 
of chance. — Ibid, vol. 1. 316. 

I cannot anyhow be contented to view the wonderful universe, and 
specially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the re- 
sult of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting 
from design and law. — Ibid, vol. ii. 312. 

Research has already shown us reason to believe "that even chemical 
atoms are very complicated structures, that an atom of pure iron is 
probably a vastly more complicated system than that of the planets and 
other satellites, that each constituent of a chemical atom must go 
through an orbit in the millionth part of the twinkling of an eye, in 
which it successively or simultaneously is under the influence of many 
other constituents, or possibly comes into collision with them, and that 
each of these particles is, as Sir John Herschel has beautifully said, for- 
ever solving differential equations which, if written out in full, might 



144 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

perhaps belt the earth." Now, what does this mean, if not that every 
ultimate atom, is full to the very heart of God, and that every particle 
of dust or every drop of water is crowded with traces of the action of the 
Divine Reason, not less marvelous, it may be, than those which astron- 
omy exhibits in the structure of the heavens, and the evolution of the 
heavenly bodies ? — Professor Flint. 

Then came the age of physical science Its theory of 

knowledge was a crude empiricism; its theology unrelieved deism. God 
was "throned in magnificent inactivity in a remote comer of the uni- 
verse," and a machmery of "second causes " had practically taken His 

place Meanwhile His immanence in nature, the " higher 

pantheism," which is a truth essential to true religion, as it is to true 

philosophy, fell into the background Darwinism, under 

the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon 
philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by showing us that we 
must choose between two alternatives. Either God is everywhere 
present in nature, or He is nowhere. He cannot be here, and not 
there. He cannot delegate His power to demigods called "second 
causes."— Rev. Aubrey Moore, M. A. 

The infinite and eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation 
of the uuiverse is none other than the living God. — Professor Fiske. 

God the Father is the ground of creation; 

God the Son is the law of creation ; 

God the Holy Ghost is the life of creation. 

God the Father originates; 
God the Son regulates; 
God the Holy Ghost actuates. 

God the Father is Deity invisible; 
God the Son is Deity manifested; 
God the Holy Ghost is Deity communicated. 

—Rev. H. V. D. Johns, D. D. 

Design, purpose, intention, appear, when all the facts of the universe 
are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to be ineradicable 
from our view of the creation. Teleology does not now depend for its ex- 
istence on Paleyan "instances;" but all the universe, its whole progress 
in time and space, is one majestic evidence of teleology. The will and 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 145 

purpose running through it are as incapable of being shut out of our 
consciousness and reasoning faculties, as its phenomena and their modes 

are of being rendered wholly imperceptible by our senses 

The teleology — that is, the inseverable motive, as it vi^ere, of all the 
activities and interactions of nature — must be the product of mind. — Dr. 
Dallinger. 

There is a wider teleology, which is not touched by the doctrine of 
evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of 
evolution. That proposition is that the whole world, living and not 
living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, 
of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebu- 
losity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain 
that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapor, and that a 
sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the 
molecules of that vapor, have predicted, say, the state of the fauna of 
Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen 

to the vapor of breath in a cold winter's day The teleo- 

logical and mechanical views of nature are not necessarily mutually 
exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator 
is, the more firmly does he assume the primordial molecular arrange- 
ment of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; 
and the more completely he is thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, 
who can always defy him to prove that this primordial molecular 
arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe. 
— Huxley. 

When we analyze the propositions or dogmatic affirmations 
of the Nicene Creed, we find that some of them are Theo- 
logical, that is, they relate to the being and nature of God; 
that others are Christological, that is, they relate to the nature 
and work of Christ; and that others are Anthropological, 
that is, they relate to mankind. In the present lecture we 
shall confine ourselves to the Theological group. Before 
entering upon it, however, I must enter a formal denial of 
two prevalent opinions which I hold to be both false and 
mischievous. 



146 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

It has become a kind of habit with many persons to talk 
about the scientific method of research, and to contrast it 
with the religious and philosophical method, as if they were 
entirely different from each other, and as if the scientific 
method resulted in a certitude which cannot be attained by 
the religious and philosophical method. Both of these 
impressions are alike untrue. The scientific or Baconian 
method consists in ascertaining facts by careful observation, 
and in verifying them as far as possible by decisive experi- 
ments, before attempting to explain them or to construct 
theories concerning them. When the facts have been 
scientifically ascertained, the logic by which veracious in- 
ferences are drawn from them differs in no respect from the 
logic of the schools. Undoubtedly it is the tendency of the 
philosophical dreamer to assume that some brilliant specu- 
lation is true because it is brilliant, without sufficiently 
ascertaining the soundness of his premises — that is his weak- 
ness; and on the other hand, it is the weakness of the man 
of science that he is too prone to assume that there can be 
no reality which does not lie within the sphere of physical 
experiment. But, in the rational discussion of any subject 
whatsoever, in which the facts are conceded to be true, the 
logic of the man of science is precisely the same as that of 
the man of letters; and the certitude of the one may be as 
indubitable as the certitude of the other. Thus, what we 
call life is beyond the region of direct experiment. It can- 
not be weighed nor measured. The tests of the laboratory 
fail to reveal its secret. Yet the processes of logic, when 
applied to many facts of observation, constrain the scientific 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY, 147 

investigator to believe beyond all doubt in the real existence 
of life; and it is in precisely the same way, and through 
precisely the same rational processes, that we reach an 
equally indubitable certitude of the existence of an original 
Source of life. 

Again it is often taken for granted that theology assumes 
much and deals largely in conjectural hypothesis, while 
Science assumes nothing and adopts no hypothesis which 
known facts do not demand. Precisely the reverse is true. 
Theology assumes nothing that Science does not assume; 
and if some of the truths which it sets forth are capable of 
being represented as hypotheses, their truth must be es- 
tablished by evidence of precisely the same sort and amount 
of probability as is held to be sufficient to establish scientific 
hypotheses which no one disputes. Thus, the hypothesis 
of evolution, which is simply incapable of experimental veri- 
fication, is nevertheless almost universally admitted by men 
of science, because, while that hypothesis cannot itself be 
verified, it explains and brings into harmonious unity a 
multitude of facts which have been severally ascertained. It 
is on precisely the same ground, and on no other, that any 
theological or religious hypothesis is entitled to acceptanoe. 
I do not say, indeed, that the facts on which religious hy- 
potheses are grounded are invariably the same as those on 
which scientific hypotheses are grounded; but this I do say, 
that the facts on which religion depends must be as surely 
ascertained, and that the hypotheses on which religious faith 
relies must rest upon as high a probability, and command 
as strong and irresistible a certitude, as any fact or hypothe- 



148 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

sis of science. In all I have to say in the present lecture I 
shall use no premises which are not confessedly as good for 
physical science as for theology. 

In treating the subject now before us, we may conveniently 
adopt the arrangement of the school authors, who approach 
it by seeking answers to these three questions: First, An sit 
Deus, that is to say, Whether there be a God; Second, Quid 
sit Deus, or What is God; and Third, Qualis sit Deus, or 
What may we know concerning God .? 

I. To the first question. Whether there be a God, the cor- 
porate reason of mankind gives an affirmative answer; and 
the corporate conclusions of universal human reason, how- 
ever imperfect in matters of detail, are not lightly to be 
disregarded. We need not depend upon them, however, 
in this case, since substantially the some logic consciously 
or unconsciously determines the belief of every individual. 
For that reason I discard what is called the metaphysical 
argument for God's existence. I certainly do not deny its 
cogency to some minds; but I do not care to dwell upon it, 
because it is cogent to only a few minds of exceptional train- 
ing and capacity. Neither, at this point, shall I use the 
teleological argument, or the argument from design, because, 
while it is exceedingly strong to very many minds when once 
suggested to them, I do not believe that it is the argument 
which has actually produced the universal verdict of human 
reason that there is a God. 

That argument is the argument from cause and effect. 
From the infancy of the human race it has been impossible 



THE IRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY, 149 

for it to believe that this finite world and the finite universe 
to which it belongs can have come into existence without 
the agency of some cause beyond them, and this impos- 
sibility has arisen from the fact that all human experience, 
and perhaps the constitution of the human mind itself, make 
it impossible to conceive that any finite thing, can be, or that 
any event can happen, without a cause, near or remote, 
visible or invisible. When we speak of a thing happening 
by chance, we do not mean that it had no cause, but that 
the cause, or combination of causes, which brought it to 
pass, was of such a kind that the efi'ect could not be fore- 
seen. The simplest event that can happen postulates a 
cause; and in complex or complicated events the same 
postulate is correspondingly strengthened. The falling of 
an apple postulates a cause, and the following up of that 
clue led to the discovery of the universal law of gravity. 
Now, if we cannot believe that a single apple falls to the 
ground without a cause, it is infinitely more incredible that 
the law of gravity which controls the motions of the spheres, 
and of every atom of every one of them, exists without a 
cause; and a universe existing by virtue of an almost infinite 
complexity of laws, each of which includes almost a whole 
infinitude of facts, is utterly incredible. In order to imagine 
it we must abandon the law of causation altogether, and 
assert, first, that things can come into existence and events 
can happen without a cause; and second, that an orderly 
and reasonable but finite universe can be produced and sus- 
tained without a reasonable cause, which is still more in- 
conceivably absurd. 



150 'J^HE GOD OF SCIENCE 

Against this argument unsophisticated human reason 
makes no objection. But sophistry raises this objection, 
that what we call a cause may really be nothing but a point 
in an invariable sequence of facts. Very well; we do not 
deny that; but we ask, What causes the sequence .? What 
makes it invariable ? And does not the invariability of a 
sequence postulate a cause far more imperiously than the 
connection of any two points that can occur in it } Again, 
it is objected that the universe may be a growth, and that, 
therefore, it need not have a cause beyond itself. Once 
again we ask, What causes the growth .? By its very nature 
growth is not eternal; it must, therefore, have had a begin- 
ning; what made it begin to grow .? Growth is a process 
of perpetual change; what causes the change ? Growth must 
proceed in some particular order; what determines or causes 
the order of the growth .? A third rather clumsy objection is 
made by David Hume, which I should hardly care to notice 
but for its near approximation to the agnosticism of the 
present day. Admitting, he said in effect, that we cannot 
conceive, for instance, of a house coming into existence, 
without assuming that it must have had a builder, yet we 
are not for that reason to infer that the universe must have 
had a Maker; because we know all about the building of a 
house, and we know nothing of the making of the universe. 
This is much the same as to say that although we cannot 
imagine the simplest things which fall within our knowledge 
to occur without an adequate cause, we can imagine the 
most complicated of all finite things to have been uncaused. 
So stated, this objection needs no answer. 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 151 

Only one objection remains. Since it is manifestly irra- 
tional to suppose that finite things can be produced or that 
events can happen without a cause, and since the concep- 
tion of a system of reasonably connected things and order- 
ly events without a reasonable cause is utterly impossible, 
there is no escape from the inference that there must be a 
Supreme and Reasonable Cause of the universe and its 
phenomena, unless by maintaining that the system of the 
universe is so essentially unreasonable as to require no 
cause to account for it. On the physical side this assump- 
tion is contradicted by every fact of science. There is noth- 
ing which the researches of science have more thoroughly 
ascertained than that the universe is governed by universal 
and inexorable law; and to say that this is a universe of 
law is to deny that it is a universe of unreason. 

On the moral side the assertion of an unreasonable uni- 
verse has certainly a semblance of support. We are con- 
strained to admit that sin and suffering and sorrow are to be 
found here, and that they are apparently bound up with the 
system of things experimentally known to us. But it can-, 
not be inferred that a world in which these evil things exist 
must needs be an unreasonable world. The facts alleged 
might go to prove that it is a non-moral or immoral world, 
and hence it might be inferred that it is the work of a non- 
moral or immoral being — that was the doctrine of Mani; but 
still they would not prove it to be a world that came, or that 
could ever have come, by chance. Even if it seemed to have 
been made for perfectly malignant purposes, its making, and 
the reason of its making, would still remain to be accounted 



152 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

for, and would still postulate a cause. Besides, we must 
not fail to notice that the mere presence of evil in the uni- 
verse does not prove a malignant purpose, unless it could be 
shown that evil is the object of the universe. If a man were 
to say, I have tooth-ache; therefore this is either a wicked 
world which no good God would create, or an absurd 
world which requires no God to account for it, you would 
quickly reply with Paley that although it is unhappily true 
that teeth ache, and that tooth-ache is a sadly evil thing, yet 
it is equally certain that teeth were not made for the purpose 
of aching, but to subserve a necessary and beneficent pur- 
pose in the economy of life. A similar argument will apply 
to all the evils which we find throughout the world. They 
are incidents — mysterious incidents, indeed — in the econo- 
my of the universe, but they are clearly not its aim or end. 
We may conclude, then, without further argument, that 
the constitution of the human mind which makes it impos- 
sible for us to conceive of the existence of a finite thing, or 
of the occurrence of any event, without a cause, compels us 
to believe in the existence of some Great First Cause of this 
finite universe and of all its operations. This argument, says 
Kant, is ''the oldest, the clearest, the most in conformity with 
the common reason of humanity. ... It is utterly hope- 
less to attempt to rob it of the authority which it has always 
enjoyed. The mind will not suffer itself to be depressed by 
the doubts suggested by subtle speculations. It rises out of 
its uncertainty the moment it casts a look at the wondrous 
forms of nature and the majesty of the universe, and it rises 
from height to height, from condition to condition, till it has 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 153 

elevated itself to the supreme and unconditioned Author of 
all. " A greater than Kant has sanctioned the cogency of 
the same argument by declaring that " the invisible things 
of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, be- 
ing perceived through the things that are made, even His 
everlasting power and divinity," as the necessary First Cause 
of the universe and all that it contains. If we adopt the 
definition of Aristotle that God is "that on which the world 
and all nature depend," we might now assume it to be irra- 
tional to disbelieve that God is. 

Here, however, we cannot leave the question of God's be- 
ing without asking whether He has any being apart from, or 
independently of the universe of which He is the Cause. 
Pantheism affirms that God and nature are one, and denies 
that He has any being either apart from or independently 
of nature. We go a long way with the affirmation of the 
Pantheist; but we join the logical agnostic in rejecting his 
negation. Christian theism does not conceive of creation 
as a causative act by which the universe was projected from 
its Creative Cause in such a way as to remain forever after 
separate from it. There is a Christian pantheism which the 
researches of science are ever tending to confirm, and which 
recognizes God as immanent in the universe of which He is 
the Cause. 

We are compelled to recognize that the forces of nature 
do reside in the objects of nature. There is something in 
the stone, as well as in the earth, which makes the stone fall 
to the earth. We call that hidden force the attraction of 
gravity; but whatever we call it, it is in the stone, and in the 



154 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 



earth, and in all matter, so evidently that we assume it to 
belong to the nature of matter. In spite of gravitation, how- 
ever, we observe that the tree rises upward from the earth, 
and that the sap of the tree rises upward in the stem, by vir- 
tue of a force which manifestly belongs to and exists in every 
seed of every plant that grows. Just so, there is something 
in animal life which enables and compels the snail to crawl, 
the bird to fly, the fish to swim, the man to move himself 
from place to place, in spite of the law of inertia. If we ex- 
amine the forces of nature themselves, we find them cu- 
riously self-applied and self-changed in their operations. 
Water, for instance, follows the universal law by which ail 
matter is expanded by heat and contracted by the withdraw- 
al of heat, until it falls to about 40 degrees Fahrenheit; but 
then it begins to expand again, so that when it reaches 32 
degrees, the frozen water floats upon the surface. Clearly 
enough, the force which first contracts the water, and the 
force which afterwards expands it, and the mysterious force 
which stops the one process and starts the other must all 
reside in the element of water, since they are universally 
found in it. Wi-thout further illustration, I think we may 
assume that the forces of nature do exist and abide in the 
objects of nature. 

But that is not all. The researches of science have shown 
that the forces of nature are not only intimately related to 
each other, but that they are actually convertible into each 
other. Rub your hands together, and the friction, which 
is simply arrested motion, converts that motion into heat. 
Rub a piece of sealing-wax upon your sleeve, and you con- 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 155 

vert motion into electricity strong enough to attract and hold 
a piece of paper. Strike a flint and steel together, and you 
make the sparks fly; that is, you change motion into light as 
well as heat. The converse is not so easily illustrated, but 
it is equally true, namely that light, heat, and electricity are 
returnable again into the form of motion. The inference is 
clear, and it is this: — that motion, heat, light and electri- 
city are merely different forms of a single force, which is at 
once simpler and more exquisitely subtle than they. Thus, 
step by step, does science lead up from the infinite complex- 
ity of the forms and forces of nature to the conception of 
one single simple force which underlies all nature and which 
causes all the forms of force which we perceive. In organic 
nature we find much the same thing. Organic nature, from 
the lowest to the highest, is a world of life, beginning with 
the cell, if, indeed, it is so much as a cell, of protoplasm, 
and rising by imperceptible variations of cellular combi- 
nation, to the form of man himself. In every individual of 
every species, from its embryotic .cell to its full maturity, 
there is something which, from the first, determines not 
only what it is, but how it shall develop, and what it shall 
become. Nay, there is often a prophecy of what the individ- 
ual never can become, but the species is destined to become, 
as in the brain of the savage, whose actual life is little above 
that of the brute, but whose brain is ready for such work as 
perhaps has never yet been done by any man upon this 
planet. If the doctrine of evolution, in the largest sense, is 
true — if it is true that the co-operation and even the appar- 
ent conflict of the forces of nature, mechanical and physi- 



156 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

ological, are jointly modifying the existing forms of life and 
evolving new forms from them — then what marvellous Some- 
what must there not be abiding in the life forms of the 
world ! Truly the researches of science seem to be steadily 
leading us up to the conviction that the First Cause of the 
universe continues to abide in it, and is the Immanent Cause 
of all the forces we discover to be operating in it ! Thus far, 
and even further, we may freely go with pantheism, holding 
with unhappy Bruno that amid the varying phenomena of 
nature there is indeed a Power which gives them coherence 
and intelligibility ; and that this Power, which is present 
through the whole and every part of nature, as the vital 
principle is present in the whole and every part of a living 
body, is none other than God. 

It is only when the pantheist denies that God has any be- 
ing independently of nature that we are compelled to join 
issue with him. We may do so briefly, and on strictly scien- 
tific grounds. For science recognizes that the visible uni- 
verse is a finite universe, . which had a definite beginning in 
time and is going on to a predestined end in time. But the 
Supreme First Cause of all finite being must Itself be eternal, 
uncaused, unconditioned, absolute. The Cause on which 
the universe depends cannot, therefore, be dependent on the 
universe. It may abide and manifest Itself in the universe, 
but It cannot be contained in the universe. The Eternal 
may reveal Itself in time, but time and the things of time 
cannot limit the Eternal. To say that absolute being is be- 
yond the grasp of human conception does not disprove its 
possibility or its actuality. It merely shows the limitation 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 157 



of our understanding. Absolute being is not a whit more 
incomprehensible than any other sort of being, as we shall 
presently see; and it is Herbert Spencer who says that ''the 
omnipresence of something which passes comprehension is 
a belief which the most unsparing criticism leaves unques- 
tionable, or rather makes ever clearer." Thus the steps of an 
inexorable logic lead up to the certainty of the existence of 
a Great First Cause of all things, which does not only mani- 
fest Itself in nature, but which has, or rather is, infinite and 
absolute Being in Itself. 

II. We now come to our second question, Quid sit Deus ? 
that is to say, What is God as to His essential nature ? The 
answer, frankly and unhesitatingly given, is that of the ag- 
nostic, namely that we do not know. Mr. Herbert Spencer 
says with great solemnity that ' ' if science and religion are to 
be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, 
widest, and most certain of all facts — that the Power which 
the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." If that 
is true, the conflict between science and religion, supposing 
that there is any such conflict, ought never to have been 
begun; for religion, or at least the Christian religion, has 
never ceased to proclaim that " deepest, widest, and most 
certain of all facts. " It was as long ago as in the days of 
Job that this ''first principle" was enunciated by Zopharthe 
Naamathite in these biting words: — "Canst thou by search- 
ing find out God .? Canst thou find out the Almighty to per- 
fection ? He is higher than heaven, what canst thou do ? 
Deeper than hell, what canst thou know ? ' 



158 THE GOD OF SCIEXCE 

And yet there is a very pregnant fact to be applied here, 
namely, that every other fact and force in the universe, con- 
sidered as to its essence, is as hopelessly inscrutable as the 
First Cause from which they proceed. Let us hear what I\Ir. 
Spencer has to say of that. 

Space and time are necessary to our modes of thought 
concerning all things. We simply cannot, if we would, im- 
agine anything to -exist without existing somewhere; and just 
as little can v>'e imagine an}-thing to happen without happen- 
ing at some time. But what are time and space .? We do 
not know. "Time and space," says Herbert Spencer, "are 
wholly incomprehensible. The immediate knowledge which 
we seem to have of them, proves, when examined, to be total 
ignorance. " 

Matter, one would think, must be intelligible to beings 
who inhabit a material universe and who are clothed with 
a material body; but is it so .? "Matter," says Mr. Spencer, 
" in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as 
space and time." 

At least we ou2:ht to know what motion is, since itbelons:s 
to our dignity as animals that we have the power to move 
ourselves from place to place. But no; j\Ir. Spencer again 
declares that we are ignorant even of that. " Neither when 
considered in connection with space," he says, " nor when 
considered in connection with matter, nor when considered 
in connection with rest, do we find that motion is truly cog- 
nizable. All efforts to understand its essential nature do 
but bring us to alternative impossibilities of thought." 

Let us go one step further back, and inquire what force is. 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY lb'9 

Surely a man can tell what it is that knocks him down. 
Not at all. ** Itis impossible," says Spencer, "■ to form any 
idea of force in itself, and equally impossible to comprehend 
its mode of existence," 

It is needless to multiply these significant admissions. 
Two or three sentences more will suffice to sum up the whole 
matter, and those sentences I shall take from Mr. Spencer: 
** The conviction that human intelligence is incapable of ab- 
solute knowledge is one that has been slowly gaining ground 
as civilization has advanced." ** Ultimate Scientific Ideas 
are all representative of realities that cannot be compre- 
hended. After no matter how great a progress in the colli- 
gation of facts and the establishment of generalizations ever 
wider and wider .... the fundamental truth remains 
as much beyond our reach as ever. To the man of science 
objective and subjective things are alike inscrut- 
able in their substance and genesis He real- 
izes with special vividness the utter incomprehensibility of 
the simplest fact considered in itself He, more than any 
other, knows that in its ultimate essence nothing can be 
known. " 

You see, then, that the fundamental proposition of agnos- 
ticism, as enunciated by its greatest expositor, does not ap- 
ply to the being of God only, but is applicable, in precisely 
the same way, to every fact and force in heaven above, and in 
the earth beneath, and in the water under the earth. When 
Mr. Spencer declares with fit solemnity that the "Power 
which the universe manifests is utterly inscrutable," it is to 
be regretted that he does not say at once, as he does say 



160 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

afterwards, that everything else in the universe is equally, 
and in precisely the same sense, inscrutable. If he had said 
so, he would not have misled an inconsiderate world, and 
himself with it, perhaps, by drawing an inference from the 
former proposition which he certainly does not draw from 
the latter. 

For that is precisely what he and the whole school of 
agnostics have unwittingly done. Their argument, fairly 
stated is this: ''The Power which the universe manifests 
(call it God if you will) is utterly inscrutable; it follows, 
therefore, that it is unknowable, and if it is unknowable, 
you will but waste time in trying to learn that which can 
never be known." Now I ask you to consider whether the 
agnostic ever dreams of applying the same argument to any 
other fact than that of the First Cause of all facts and phe- 
nomena. Let us see how it would sound in another con- 
nection to which it applies equally well, as thus: — Matter 
and force are utterly inscrutable; it follows that they are un- 
knowable; but if they are unknowable, it is a waste of time 
to study that which cannot be known; therefore scientific 
study is a busy idleness, which leads to nothing better than 
laborious ignorance ! 

Put the case in that way, and the agnostic would be swift 
to lay his finger on the fallacy. He would tell you at once 
that you were using the word inscrutable in a double sense, 
and that though a thing may be inscrutable as to its essen- 
tial nature, its operations and relations may still be perfectly 
and advantageously observable. Thus he might point you 
to the immense number of facts which we have discovered 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 161 

concerning vi\2X\.Qx, though the essential nature of matter in it- 
self remains, and must ever remain, inscrutable and unknow- 
able. Or he might point you to our knowledge of motion, 
heat, light and electricity, the essential nature of which is 
confessedly inscrutable, but which are so perfectly observ- 
able that we are enabled, by observing them, to predicate 
not only their reciprocal convertibility, but the existence of 
another force, subtler than any of them, which thus far has 
eluded observation. 

Now, I ask you in all reasonableness why the same dis- 
tinction does not apply to the study of God 1 Let us admit, 
as we do, that the essential nature of God in Himself is inscrut- 
ble and therefore unknowable; but does it follow that we can 
know nothing about God ? I trow not. If we can discover 
any thing that God does, or has ever caused to be done, that 
alone is to learn something concerning Him; and rightly 
reasoned out, it ought to furnish us the means of learning 
more concerning Him. Though the question Quid sit Deus 
must remain forever without answer, there remains another 
question which is not unanswerable in the same sense, or 
in the same degree. That question is, Qualis sit Deus, or 
What may we know concerning the nature of God } 

in. I submit to you that in the observations which we 
have already made, we have discovered quite stupendous 
truths concerning the nature of God. Let us glance back- 
wards and reconsider. 

Surely it is something to have discovered that, unless all 
human reason is essentially unreasonable, God is, and that 



162 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 



He is an absolute Being, dependent upon no other being; 
that He is beyond all conditions of space or time, or, in 
other words, that He is infinite and eternal; that He is never- 
theless revealed in a finite universe; that He is the Cause of 
all the facts, forces and phenomena of nature, and conse- 
quently that He must be of inconceivable power. We have 
learned that the universe of which He is the sole Cause is 
a universe of all-pervading law, that is to say, of all-per- 
vading reason; so that unless reason can proceed from un- 
reason, the First Cause of this reasonable universe must 
be a reasonable Being. Further still we may go. We our- 
selves, as part of the universe, owe our being and our facul- 
ties to the First Cause from which they have proceeded. 
Life as well as reason must therefore have proceeded and 
come forth from God, so that unless life can come from life- 
lessness — an hypothesis contradicted by every trustworthy 
experiment — the eternal Source of life must be a living God. 
I submit to you that these truths, which are as certain as any 
other truths that reason can discover, are enough to set aside 
the fallacy of the agnostic. Let it be granted without the 
slightest hesitation that ' ' in its ultimate essence, nothing 
can be known," and still the fact remains that we can learn 
by observation a virtual infinitude of facts concerning the 
essentially inscrutable elements of nature. In like manner, 
we need not hesitate to concede that ''the Power v.hich 
the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable " ; and 
yet it appears that we can learn at least these things concern- 
ing It ? — that It is a living and reasonable and eternal Be- 
ing of inconceivable power; and that this Being has been 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 163 

manifested at least to that extent in the visible creation of 
which It is the First and only Original Cause. Perhaps, if 
we now return to the beginning and prosecute our inquiry 
from another point of acknowledged scientific truth, we may 
hope to learn more concerning the same eternally inscrutable 
Being. 

In our second lecture I quoted the following sentences 
form Mr. Spencer: ** The Manifestations of force occurring 
either in ourselves or outside of ourselves, do not persist; 
but that which does persist is the Unknown Cause of these 
manifestations. In other words, asserting the persistence 
of force is but another mode of asserting an Unconditioned 
Reality, without beginning or end." Now, according to 
the theory of evolution, as stated by Mr. Spencer, the uni- 
verse first appeared as an undifferentiated chaos. If we ad- 
mit this assumption or hypothesis, for it is nothing else and 
nothing more, there must have been a time when the forces 
now operating in the universe were introduced into chaos; 
and it is conceded that they must have had their origin in 
the Unconditioned Reality which is the acknowledged Source 
of all forces. How, then, was the creative act, for so it must 
be called, by which those forces were introduced into chaos, 
brought about .? Smce the Creative Power is acknowledged 
to have been " unconditioned," it could not be constrained 
by any other power or cause whatsoever. It must therefore 
have been freely self-moved to that act and to all its acts. 
But an act of free self-movement or self-determination is 
an act of will; and indeed the only way in which force is 
ever experimentally known to be originated in this world is 



164 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

through an exercise of power determined by an act of will. 
Consequently, the Creative Power must be a self-moved, self- 
determined, or in one word, a voluntary Being. It is one 
of the curious phenomena of intellectual eccentricity that in 
this connection men have argued that the Creative Will is 
an unconscious Will. Thus Hartmanngoes so far as to say 
that although there is an universal Will to which all phe- 
nomena must be referred, and although he maintains that it 
is an intelligent Will, yet he insists that it is also an uncon- 
scious Will. I frankly confess that I do not consider such 
a proposition worthy of discussion; for I submit to you that 
the exercise of an intelligent will, or, in other words, an in- 
telligent act of choice, without consciousness of that act, is 
not only inconceivable but impossible. 

Let us now ask ourselves whether the Unconditioned Real- 
ity, which we find to be intelligently and voluntarily ener- 
getic, is also a moral Being. From the teaching of Mr. 
Spencer alone one might certainly hope so, since he says 
that the arrangement of the universe is such that the right 
has an immense advantage in the struggle for existence. But 
Matthew Arnold goes much further. In view of all that sci- 
ence has discovered and that historv has disclosed, he de- 
clares it to be a verifiable fact that in the government of the 
world there is an Eternal (Power) — and there can be only 
One such Power — that makes for righteousness; so that the 
man or the people that would be well in any best sense must 
love righteousness and hate iniquity. If this be true, and 
it is denied only by a few extreme pessimists, the Eternal 
Power must be a moral Being; and I know not how an in- 



THE TJ^IUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 166 

telligent, voluntary and moral being shall be other than a per- 
sonal being. How intelligence, will and morality can exist 
without personality, I, for my part, cannot conceive. It is 
true that Matthew Arnold used many a jibe of a scholastic sort 
at the words ** thinking" and "loving" as applied to the 
Eternal. He had a fair provocation to do so in the careless 
use of those words by other men of lesser eminence than he; 
but after all, ''thinking," and "loving," when so applied, are 
meant only to suggest the intelligence and benevolence of 
God. No one pretends that our little brain-swirls and nerve- 
swirls are, or can be, anything more than suggestions of the 
sublime intelligence and love of the Eternal. That indubi- 
table truth Mr. Arnold was never weary of expounding; but 
he would surely have done well to expound the complemen- 
tary truth that the bare existence of our own moral and intel- 
lectual natures, imperfect as they are, implies and postulates 
an infinite Reality of Wisdom and Goodness in the Eternal 
Source from which they come. 

It would surely be a significant fact if it should appear 
that the doctrine of God which is thus logically inferred 
from strictly scientific premises, should be found, as far as 
it goes, to be the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, If that 
should prove to be the case, I submit to you {a) that there 
must be some other than the scientific and inductive meth- 
od of arriving at truth, since nothing is more certain than 
this, that the Nicene doctrine of God was neither grounded 
on scientific observations nor established by induction. If 
we should find that the Nicene Creed makes further state- 



166 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

merits concerning God to which the facts of science have 
not originally led, but which perfectly accord with every 
known fact of science, I submit to you {U) that there will 
now be a strong a priori probability of the truth of those 
further statements. And if we then find that the theology 
of the Nicene Creed, taken merely as a scientific hypoth- 
esis, answers that purpose for all the facts of science as per- 
fectly as the hypothesis of evolution answers for a portion 
of them, and covers every unfilled gap in the evolutionary 
hypothesis, I submit to you (c) that, on strictly scientific 
grounds, the theology of the Nicene Creed would stand 
incomparably better established than the partial theory of 
evolution. It is to these points that I now ask your atten- 
tion; and the first thing to be done is simply to inquire 
what the Nicene Creed does actually assert concerning 
God. 

Beyond all question, the Nicene Creed asserts the doc- 
trine of a perfect Trinity existing from eternity in the Di- 
vine Being, that is to say a Trinity of consciously distinct 
Persons abiding in one perfect and indivisible unity. I 
know that this is often supposed to be a contradiction in 
terms. I hope to be able to show you that it is neither a 
contradiction, nor a parodox; that, if we consider it <2 /rzbn', 
it is eminently probable; and that considered a posteriori, 
it makes the theology of the Nicene Creed identical with the 
theology of science and induction, that is, to the extent to 
which science and induction can establish a theology. 

I suppose it will be admitted that if all the works of an 
author are found to have some universal characteristic, it is 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 167 

logical to infer that the original of that characteristic must 
exist in that author; and if it is true that the works of na- 
ture are not works thrown off and abandoned by the Divine 
Author of nature, but works in which He is pleased to abide, 
then it is logical to infer that any universal characteristic 
of nature must be characteristic of the Author of nature. 
Now, in nature, and in every part of it, we discover a trin- 
ity of substance, form and force. We can conceive of noth- 
ing, and certainly we know of nothing m the universe, which 
does not exist substantially. We can conceive of no sub- 
stance, and we know none, which has not some form. We 
can conceive of nothing, and we know nothing, which has 
not qualities of some sort, or, in other words, which does 
not exert some sort of force. This is true of the universe at 
large; it is equally true of every atom in the universe; and 
it is as true of organic nature as of the nature which we call 
inorganic. The atom which no miscroscope has ever yet 
enabled man to see must have substance, form and force as 
surely as the greatest sun that gems the firmament; and from 
the protoplastic cell up to man himselfthere is some substan- 
tial reality which determines the form and controls the vital 
forces of every living creature. 

The best single thing that I have been able tcf think of as 
an illustration of this universal truth is the common horse- 
shoe magnet. Its substance is magnetic iron; but all mag- 
netic iron does not exist in the form of a horse-shoe. It 
might exist, and does exist, in any number of forms; it can- 
not exist without some form. Yet, whatever the form may 
be, the form is there because the substance is there. After 



168 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

we have seen a thing we may picture its form in our minds 
without thinking of any substance in connection with it; 
but we cannot imagine the real objective existence of a form 
without some substance of which it is the form. It appears, 
then, that substance and form go together; that there can be 
no real form apart from substance; and that there can be no 
substance without a form. Yet, while form and substance 
are inseparable, the form is not the substance, and the sub- 
stance, whatever it may be, is not the form. Moreover, in 
the order of reality, as well as in the order of thought, the 
form is of the substance, or, in other words, the form exists 
because the substance exists, and not contrariwise the sub- 
stance because of the form. In the inorganic world, we 
often find that the nature of the substance determines its 
form; in organic nature it is invariably so. In a living body, 
of whateve order, it is not the body, but the inscrutable 
living somewhat, other than the body, which determines the 
bodily form and governs all changes of form; but neither 
in organic nor in inorganic nature does the form determine 
the nature of the substance. 

Moreover, wherever we find substance and form, there 
we find force. In the horse-shoe magnet the particular 
force which* is most remarkable is magnetic force. Here 
again, we find that the force and the substance are insepara- 
ble; there is no substance apart from force, nor can we 
conceive of force apart from substance. Yet, as before, 
the force is not the substance, and the substance is not the 
force. And, as before, the force is of the substance, that is 
to say, the force exists because the substance exists, and 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 169 

not contrariwise, the substance because of the force. There 
is magnetic force because there is a horse-shoe magnet, and 
not contrariwise a horse-shoe magnet because there is a 
magnetic force. 

Nowj in every object, animate and inanimate, known to 
man, and in any mode of being conceivable to man, there 
are these three things : substance, form and force. No one 
of the three is, or is convertible into, either of. the others. 
Each is different from each of the others. Each is neces- 
sary to the others. No one of them is separable from the 
others. Each and all of these three are necessary to the real- 
ity and unity of any being, animate or inanimate, in the 
universe. Would it be absurd, then, to infer that these 
three must, in some supreme sense, belong to all being ? 
I think not. I think it reasonable to believe that a law of 
being which demonstrably and verifiably exists in all known 
being must have its very root in the inscrutable Being which 
is the Source of all the being that we know. But if it were 
so, even in Supreme Being, then there would be something 
more than we have seen in our poor illustration of the 
horse-shoe magnet. For Supreme Being must surely be 
conscious being, and supremely conscious being. If our 
horse-shoe magnet were fully conscious of the three dis- 
tinct realities which are indissolubly united in its being, the 
substance of it would be conscious of itself; the form 
would be conscious of itself; and the indwelling force 
would be conscious of itself. Each would be conscious of 
its unity with the others, and of its difference from the 
others. Thus there would be the consciousness of an in- 



170 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

separable unity, together with that reaUty and consciousness 
of difference, which is distinctive of personality. Unless, 
then, the Divine Source of all being is less than perfect 
created being would be, if it were endowed with perfect 
consciousness, we must conclude that in God there is a 
Divine and consciously Substantial Being, of which, and in 
unity with which, there is a conscious Divine Form, and 
also a conscious Divine Power. 

Here again, however, we may learn something more from 
our horse-shoe magnet. Bring the positive pole of the 
magnet near to a needle, but without touching the needle, 
and what happens ? The needle springs to the magnet. 
That is what seems to happen ; but what really does hap- 
pen is that the magnetic force of the iron proceeds from the 
iron to the needle, and draws it to the magnet. Yet the 
force which thus proceeds from the magnet continues to 
abide in it in all its fulness. Use your magnet as often 
as you please — keep it, if you please, in continual use — 
and its power is none the less. While proceeding from the 
magnet, that power continues to abide there, and abides 
there undiminished. It may spend itself forever, and yet 
it will remain forever unspent. What we can see so plainly 
with our eyes in the operation of the magnet is as really 
true of every atom in the universe. If, then, we may learn 
anything whatever of the source of all being from the uni- 
versal facts of all the being that is known to us, what can 
we infer but that The Divine Being, without change of Its 
Divine and Eternal Nature, may nevertheless send forth Its 
Power, so to speak, from Itself, while that Power shall 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 171 



abide unchanged and undiminished within Itself? Thus 
It may exhibit Its Power immanent and operative in the 
forces of innumerable worlds and of countless creatures in 
every world, while that same sublime Power remains whole 
and undiminished in the Divine Being, and forever inscrut- 
able to every creature. 

Is this, then, what is meant by the doctrine of the Trin- 
ity as stated in the Nicene Creed ? I shall ask you to ex- 
amine the Creed itself to find an answer. Only, you must 
recollect that in the Creed the word " Son," as I have said 
in the last lecture, is a symbolic word, not a word of scien- 
tific definition. It is not only the best word that could be 
chosen; it is the word our Saviour chose to declare His per- 
sonal relation to the Father. But even He, when speaking 
of eternal facts, could use no other than the language of 
time, which is the language of imperfect symbol. As to 
His eternal Nature, the Creed asserts that He was ' ' begot- 
ten of the Father before all worlds ; " not, however, by an 
act oi generation, for an act of generation would be a tem- 
poral act; but by virtue of an eternal relation, like that of 
form to substance. St. Paul uses that very language when he 
says that the eternal Son of God was "in the form of God," 
and therefore *' thought it not robbery to be equal with 
God." St. John, adopting the Platonic language of his 
time, said, "In the beginning was the Word (Logos, i, e., 
Word or Reason) and the Word was with God., and the 
Word was God." The difference between the expressions 
of the two Apostles is a difference of phrase only, since a 
word is the manifested form of an idea, as reason is the in- 



172 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

tellectual form of wisdom. Here, however, we must dis- 
tinguish between form in the sense of mere shape and the 
far more significant sense in which it is used by St. Paul. 
The form of a crystal, for example, is much more than shape; 
it is at once a determinate and necessary consequence of 
the nature of the substance of which it is composed and the 
medium through which that substance is related to all other 
substances. In the world of life we may perceive the same 
truth even more manifestly; for in every living creature 
there is some inscrutable vital entity which determines its 
bodily form, and yet the bodily form of the living entity is 
not merely a visible shape, but also, and much more, an 
organism by which the creature is mediately related to the 
rest of nature. So the personal and divine Form of God is 
not to be conceived as merely subsisting in an eternal rela- 
tion to the divine Essence of which it is begotten, but also 
as the only and necessary mediator between God and all that 
is not God. The Psalmist may have spoken more and bet- 
ter than he knew when he said, *' By the Word of the Lord 
were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the 
Breath of His mouth." When the creative act was done 
which brought a cosmos out of chaos, the Mediating Agent 
of the Maker of all things visible and invisible was the 
Eternal Word; the Creative Power was the Eternal Spirit. 
From then till now the Mediating Agent is the same, the 
Word of God, the Reason that appears in nature and its 
marvellously reasonable processes; the Eternal Spirit, which 
proceedeth from the Father, yet abideth ever in the Father, 
is the Power exhibited in all phenomena of force and life. 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. I73 

That is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed concerning God. 
That is the meaning of the sublime declaration: *'We be- 
lieve in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven 
and earth, and of all things visible and invisible ; and in the 
only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before 
all worlds, by Whom all things are made ; and in the Holy 
Ghost, the Lord, the Life-Giver, Who proceedeth from the 
Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is wor- 
shipped and glorified.'' 

More than once I may have seemed to you to undervalue 
the teleological argument, that is, the argument from de- 
sign, which is sometimes called "the carpenter theory." I 
do not at all undervalue it ; to do so would be to under- 
value the argument of the Psalmist when he says, "The 
heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament show- 
eth forth His handiwork." But the teleological argument 
proves nothing more than a Creator of finite things, and 
therefore it cannot prove an infinite Creator. It falls far 
short of what we need. Moreover, it has generally been 
used after the manner of the deists, that is, to prove the 
being of a God beyond nature, who, having once for all 
made the universe, has cast it off to go its way under the 
necessity of arbitrary laws. So used, the teleological argu- 
ment may be worse than useless; it may be almost mis- 
chievous. At best, the conception of God as a Contriver is 
a make-shift. As Principal Caird has admirably said, "Our 
admiration of the power and skill of a human designer is 
enhanced by the supposed intractableness of the materials 



174 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

with which he works ; but when the Divine Designer is con- 
ceived of as Himself the creator of these materials, He 
must, according to this anthropomorphic notion, be Him- 
self responsible for that original intractableness which He is 
supposed afterwards to manifest His skill in overcoming. 
Where difficulties are of one's own creating, no credit for 
wisdom can be due to the act which evades or vanquishes 

them The form of thought, therefore, under 

which we are forced to conceive of this designer is, at best, 
that of an agent who comes in with a second idea, or a 
subsequently struck-out device, not present to him in his 
original or creative thought ; of one who improves upon or 
corrects his first conception. Finally, though by the sup- 
plementary notion of Providence, we get rid of the limitar 
lion in the case of human contrivers, viz., that their thought 
and power cease to be in or with their work as soon as they 
have finished its construction and surrendered it to the 
keeping of the ordinary laws of nature, yet this device does 
not wholly purge the primary idea of its finitude. The 
Providence that comes in to sustain the mechanism which 
the Divine Contriver has completed is something outside 
of that mechanism itself, and therefore limited by it. The 
work has a definite nature of its own, apart from the power 
that merely props it up or keeps it going. As we cannot 
think of the Divine Contriver as going on perpetually recre- 
ating the same work, but must think of the completed work 
as having a particular character and form of its own which 
He has merely to sustain, it is obvious that there must be 
something in the work which lies outside of or apart from 
Him." 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 175 

But to continue in the language of the same admirable 
writer, ' ' There is, indeed, another kind of teleology — 
what may be designated as inner or essential teleology — to 
which the foregoing objections are not applicable, and 
of which we have an example in the animal organism. 
The thought or design which is at work in the growth and 
development of organized structures is not a mere mechan- 
ical power or cunning acting from without — shaping, ad- 
justing, putting together materials prepared to its hand, 
constructing them according to an ingenious plan, after 
the manner of a maker of machines. Here, on the con- 
trary, the idea or formative power goes with the matter 
and constitutes the very indwelling essence of the thing. 
Instead of coming in as an afterthought, to give to exist- 
ing materials a new use and purpose not included or pre- 
supposed in their own original nature, the idea or design 
is present from the very beginning, inspiring the first mi- 
nute atom or cell with the power of the perfect whole that 
it is to be. Nor, for the building up and completing of 
the structure, is there any call for the interposition of ex- 
ternal agency. From first to last it is self-formative, self- 
developmg; the life within resists all merely outward in- 
terference, and subordinates all outward conditions to its 
own development. In this case, therefore, we do not need 
to go beyond or outside of the thing itself in seeking for 
the explanation of it. The thought or reason that explains 
it is within itself, nay, is its very self; so that to perceive or 
know the thing at all, is to perceive or know the reason 
and ground of its existence. Nor, lastly, can we here sep- 



17(] THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

arate the notions of existence and preservation — the nature 
of the thing, and the providence that keeps it up — so as to 
make the one a limit to the other. The idea, or active 
formative thought, in which an organism lives, needs no 
second or foreign idea to preserve or sustain it. It is, in a 
certain sense, its own providence. The continuous exist- 
ence of the organism lies in the perpetual activity of the 
vital principle, \yhich is, so to speak, ever re-creating it, 
ever engaged in that process of continuous self-differentia- 
tion and integration, the cessation of which would be the 
extinction of its very existence. 

"Now, if it were possible to extend this teleological 
idea to the whole finite world, we should be able to see in 
the world the manifestation of a kind of design to which 
the objections urged against the ordinary design argument 
would no longer be applicable; for what we should then 
have before us would be one vast, self-consistent system, 
one organic whole, one self-evolving, self-realizing idea, 
infusing the lucidity of reason into all things, potentially 
present in the lowest order of existences, slowly advancing 
itself, without cleft or arbitrary leap, from lower to higher ; 
so that the lower, though not the cause, would be the pre- 
supposition and the unconscious prophecy of the higher, 
the higher the explanation of the lower, and the highest of 
all that in which the meaning, end, or aim of the whole 
would be clearly seen. Such a teleological view of the 
world would not involve a representation of Divine Intelli- 
gence as an arbitrary agency brought in from without to 
fill up gaps or improve on its original products, nor as a 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 177 



power acting in different isolated capacities — now as cre- 
ator, now as contriver, now as sustainer — but as the in- 
ward life and reason of all things, anticipating and fore- 
shadowing the end from the beginning, and moving on^. 
wards in its own continuous, self-conditioned process to an 
end which itself determines." 

That, certainly as I conceive it, is the teleology of the 
Nicene Creed, the teleology of St. Paul, when he says that 
"by Him Who is the Image of the invisible God, all things 
subsist," so that "we live and move and have our being" 
in God, immanent in the universe He has brought into ex- 
istence, and in which the glory of His presence and abid- 
ing Power is manifestly revealed. 

In nature, so conceived, there are no gaps to be filled up 
such as are left wide open by the theory of evolution. Ev- 
olution assumes an original undifferentiated chaos — an hy- 
pothesis which is simply unthinkable. Evolution can give 
no account of the origin of the undifferentiated chaos, nor 
of the entrance of force into it. After admitting the intro- 
duction of mechanical force to have been necessary to the 
change of chaos into cosmos, evolution can give no ac- 
count of the incoming of life-force. Admitting life-force, 
it has no account to render of consciousness, still less of 
reason. Thus, if we admit the hypothesis of evolution — 
and I know of no Christian ground on which we need hesi- 
tate to do so — we have covered only one domain of the 
universe with a reasonable and consistent theory. The the- 
ology of the Nicene Creed is perfectly consistent with the 
theory of evolution, accounts for all its facts, and fills every 



178 THE GOD OF SCIENCE 

gap between them. Moreover, the theology of the Nicene 
Creed makes no demand upon the reason which an evolu- 
tionist like Mr. Spencer does not admit to be logically justi- 
fied. Mr. Spencer's main contention is that the existence 
of the universe shows the being of an eternal Reality to be 
*'the most certain of all things," because, without such a 
Reality, he cannot intellectually bridge the gap betwen orig- 
ginal chaos and the existing cosmos. The Nicene theology 
bridges every other apparent gap in the continuity of na- 
ture in precisely the same way, by recognizing the opera- 
tion of precisely the same Supreme Power, and by its doc- 
trine of that Power it clears every difficulty of belief so sim- 
ply that its faith becomes a lofty exercise of reason. The 
God of Deism is inadequate to the intellectual requirements 
of this age. The impersonal God of Pantheism existing 
only in finite nature utterly fails to explain the origin of 
Nature. The Triune God of the Nicene Creed, in Whom 
we live and move and have our being, is the only God in 
Whom modern science leaves it possible to believe ; and, 
to completeness even of scientific thought, that Triune God 
is indispensable. 

In conclusion, I beg you to remember that the state- 
ments of the Nicene Creed were not founded on scientific 
observations and inductions, but on the authority of Jesus 
Christ. Now, after the lapse of fifteen hundred years, those 
statements, so far as they have been tested by the scientific 
and inductive method, are found not only to bear the test, 
but to supply the links of continuity which science owns 
her inability to foro^e in framing a rational theory of the 



THE TRIUNE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY. 179 

cosmos. I ask you, then, whether we are not entitled to 
claim that the authority of Jesus Christ, and not only the 
Nicene theology, is confirmed and established by science, 
in those particulars in which the witness of science is avail- 
able ? I ask you whether we are not entitled to claim that 
in the authority of Jesus Christ we have a source of truth 
beyond that which is appropriate to scientific studies ? I 
ask you whether there is not an overwhelming probability 
that any further statements made by Him, or by His au- 
thority, are as true as those which, after nineteen hundred 
and fifty years, are found to stand the tests of a science 
which had not been born when Jesus Christ lived among 
men ? Since we find not only that science itself postulates 
a God, but that the God Whom science postulates is the 
God declared by Jesus Christ, I ask you whether the ques- 
tion, What is Christ ? is not far more than likely to find its 
true answer in the account which Christ gave of Himself? 



LECTURE VI. 
CONCLUSION, 



LECTURE VI. 

CONCLUSION. 

DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM LEAVES THE CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 
UNMOVED. THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. THE SELF-EVIDENCE 
OF CHRIST. INCARNATION. MIRACLE. THE SUPREME 
VERIFICATION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. — ^John xiv. 9. 

If there is one fact recorded in Scripture which is entitled in the fullest 
sense of the word to the name of a miracle, the resurrection of Clirist is 
that fact. Here, at least, is an instance in which the entire Christian' 
faith must stand or fall with oar belief in the supernatural.^ — DeAN 
Mansel. 

The fact that Christ appeared as a worker of miracles is the best at- 
tested fact in his whole biography, both by the absolute unanimity of alt 
the witnesses and by countless other confirmations of circumstances not 
likely to have been invented, striking sayings connected with them, etc, 
— EccE Homo. 

Miracles are, in themselves, extremely improbable things, and cannot 
be admitted unless supported by a great concurrence of evidence. For 
some of the evangelicai miracles there is a concurrence of evidence, 
wtiich, when fairly considered, is very great indeed; for example, for 
the resurrection, for the appearance of Christ to St. Paul, for the general 
fact that Christ was a miraculous Healer of disease. The evidence by 
which these facts are supported cannot be tolerably accounted for by 
any hypothesis except that of their being true. And if they are once 
admitted, the antecedent improbability of many miracles less strongly 
attested is much diminished. — Ibid. 

■ Whoever would deny the presence of the divine power in human 
history must first reduce the Character of Jesus of Nazareth to the level 
of the possibilities of human nature. He is Himself the greatest of 'His 
miracles. — Newman Smyth. ' . .. . , 

183 



184 CONCLUSION. 



It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What ma" could have fabri- 
cated Jesus ? None but Jesus. — Theodore Parker. 

The facts of religious feeling are to me as certain as the facts of 
physics No atheistic reasoning can, I hold, dislodge re- 
ligion from the heart of man As an experience of con- 
sciousness, it is perfectly beyond the assaults of logic— Tyndall. 

It should not be forgotten that opinions have a moral side to them. — 
Sir James Stephen. 

- Feeling and conscience are more than helps to logic in finding truth. 
They are themselves organs for the discovery of truth.— Caird. 

We may question the decisions of the intellect, but it is at our peril 
that we tamper with the verdict of the heart.— Robertson. 

The teaching of Jesus carried morality to the sublimest point attained, 

or even attainable, by humanity He presented the rare 

spectacle of a life, so far as we can estimate it, uniformly noble and 
consistent with His own lofty principles, so that the imitation of Christ 
has become almost the final word in the preaching of His religion, and 
must continue to be one of the most powerful elements of its permanence. 
— Supernatural Religion. 

Thou didst cry unto me from afar, and I heard Thee even as the heart 
heareth; and there was no more place left for doubt.— St. Augustine. 

Let all the doctors hold their peace; speak Thou alone to me. — St. 
Thomas a Kempis. 

We may admit that there are notions, ideas, beliefs, which cannot be 
deduced syllogistically, which the logic of the understanding cannot justi- 
fy, and yet maintain that by a profounder logic, which enters into the 
genesis, and traces the secret rhythm and evolution of thought, they can 
be shown to rise out of, and be affiliated to, other ideas, and to form 
constituent elements in that living process of which all truth consists. — 
Caird. 

In the previous lecture I endeavored to show that the evi- 
dences of Christianity would be made only clearer, and that 
its sublimest truths would receive nothing but confirmation, 
if we should frankly admit the ascertained facts of physical 
science and apply to them the same methods of logical scru- 



conclusion: 135 



tiny which are used by reasoners in all departments of scien- 
tific research. In the present lecture I must glance far more 
rapidly than I could wish at several points which seem to me 
to be of great importance; but first of all I desire briefly to 
show you that, if we should deal with the most destructive 
criticism of the Holy Scriptures in the same open and can- 
did way in which we have tried to deal with scientific dif- 
ficulties, Christianity would receive no damage. 

I have already shown, conclusively, as I think, that the 
Christian religion is committed to no theory whatever of the 
inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, and to no critical theory 
of their date, their authorship, or their composition. If that 
is true, then it follows that no facts v/hich criticism has es- 
tablished, or ever can establish, can be inconsistent with the 
truth of Christianity. Yet the value of documentary evi- 
dence of the origin of Christianity, contemporary with its 
first propagation as a revealed religion, is by no means 
slight; and it is satisfactory to know that the most destruc- 
tive criticism which has ever been applied to the contents of 
the New Testament leaves four important documents unim- 
peached. No one denies that St. Paul's epistles to the Ro- 
mans, his two epistles to the Corinthians, and his epistle to 
the Galatians, are authentic letters of their reputed author; 
and the contents of those letters tell us who their author was, 
when and to whom he wrote, the doctrine that he taught and 
the grounds on which he rested his own belief in that doc- 
trine and appealed to others to believe it. Let us examine 
these points very briefly. 

The writer of these letters was undoubtedly a Jew of great 



186 CONCLUSION. 



learning, educated in the strictest Judaism, and zealous in 
its defence. He was a contemporary of our Lord, and prob- 
ably of nearly the same age as He. It does not appear 
that he had ever personally met or heard our Saviour; but 
it is perfectly certain that he had known the fact of our Lord's 
death at, or soon after, the time of its occurrence, and it is 
not less certain that, about the same tinie, he must have 
heard the testimony of some of the disciples to the fact of 
His resurrection. He did not believe their testimony, but 
rejected it with such zeal as to be chosen by the Jewish au- 
thorities to proceed to Damascus to crush the Christian sect 
which had appeared even there at a very early date. How 
much of the Gospel story Saul may have heard before he set 
out to Damascus we do not know. It is probable that he had 
heard much more of it than is commonly supposed; because 
the story itself was public and notorious; because it is alto- 
gether improbable that a learned man like Saul would under- 
take to suppress a sect of his countrymen without informing 
himself of its tenets; and also because such knowledge would 
account in a large measure for the apparent suddenness of 
his conversion. As he went on his persecuting mission, re- 
volving, doubtless, all that he had heard, it is not impossi- 
ble nor improbable that the mingled pathos and majesty of 
the life and death of Christ may have moved his heart and 
troubled his mind; it is neither impossible nor improba- 
ble that he may have thought that such a life and such a 
death were not unworthy of a Son of God; it is more than, 
likely that he may have inwardly revolted from the work of 
persecuting the followers of such a Man; there is reason to 



CONCLUSION. 187 



t)elieve that he found it ' ' hard to kick against the pricks "' of 
an uneasy conscience; yet he continued steadfast in his pur- 
pose until, as he continued to beheve to his life's end, the 
crucified, dead and buried Jesus Himself appeared to him. 
Accepting this supreme proof that Jesus still lived, and that 
He must therefore be all that He professed to be, Saul be- 
came a member of the sect which he had persecuted, and 
was baptized in the Name which he thenceforth honored 
above every other name. Presently he received what he held 
to be a call to preach the Gospel and went down into Ara- 
bia to prepare himself for that great work. Three years he 
abode there and at Damascus, studying that profound sys- 
tem of thought of which we have the outlines in his extant 
epistles. Then he visited Jerusalem and spent fifteen days 
with the Apostle Peter, only to find that their Gospel was 
the same. Fourteen years passed before he went again to 
Jerusalem to attend the council which was held to settle the 
question of the obligation of the law of Moses on Gentile 
converts; and then again, fearing that in any respect he 
might have been preaching vain doctrine, he privately com- 
municated to the heads of the Church at Jerusalem the Gos- 
pel he had preached among the Gentiles. Again he found 
that his Gospel and theirs were one and the same. He who 
had seen Christ but once, and then in so unusual a way that 
he might conceivably have been deceived, had the satisfac- 
tion to know that many other men who had gone in and 
out with Jesus all the time of His earthly life, who had heard 
His words and been witnesses of His works, who had seen 
and conversed with Him many times after His death and 



188 CONCLUSION. 



burial, were ready to go to prison, to torture and to a con- 
vict's death maintaining the reality of the great fact of His 
resurrection, of which Paul, too, was a witness. Paul's Gos- 
pel and theirs, wherever it had been preached, was substan- 
tially the same Gospel. Whether at Jerusalem, the Holy City 
of Israel, or at Rome, the capital of the civilized world, or 
at Corinth, the mercantile emporium of the East and the 
West, or in the obscure districts of the rural province of 
Galatia, one and the same truth of Christ had been taught 
and believed on the faith of one and the same evidence of 
its truth. 

So much may be learned from the Epistle to the Galatians 
alone; and from that epistle and the three others now under 
consideration we may learn the character of the persons to 
whom these letters were addressed. They were both Jews 
and Gentiles, and therefore included both classes of those to 
whom the Gospel was to be commended, and by whom it 
was to be investigated. 

In the Jews it had to encounter a vehemence of opposi- 
tion of which Paul could not complain, since he himself had 
been a persecutor. It is true that he commended the Gos- 
pel to them as the rich fulfilment of all that Moses and the 
prophets had taught and foretold; but at the same time he 
told them that the Mosaic law which they regarded with super- 
stitious reverence had been superseded; and he called upon 
them to abandon at once and forever that national caste sys- 
tem which has been the pride and strength of Israel through- 
out all ages. His own example showed that to embrace the 
Gospel would be to cut themselves off from the authorities of 



CONCLUSION. 189 



their religion, and to become outcasts from their kindred. It 
was not in human nature to make such sacrifices for slight 
reasons, nor without indubitable proofs of the rightfulness 
of the claims of a Messiah whom no one denied to have been 
crucified as a malefactor, but of whom they had no personal 
knowledge. Now, it was no great task for a Jew at that time 
to ascertain the truth. All of these four epistles date within 
twenty-five years of the death of Christ; and the chief wit- 
nesses of the resurrection had been accessible for a quarter of 
a century, and were still accessible to any of the many Jews 
who were constantly resorting to Jerusalem. It can hardly 
be doubted, therefore, that many Jewish converts must have 
consulted those witnesses before they consented to accept a 
Gospel which entailed such sacrifices. 

The Gentiles to whom the Gospel was offered could not 
be .expected to be less exacting in their demand for sufii- 
cient evidence of its truth. It required them to surrender the 
liberty of conduct which all forms of heathenism allowed 
them to indulge without scruple; to ally themselves with a 
people which was everywhere detested and despised; to be- 
come the devotees and worshippers of a crucified malefactor. 
Doubtless, then, as always, the sweet story of the Gospel so 
moved men's hearts as to win their love and faith without 
external evidence; but it would be too much to believe that 
keen-witted Greeks and sober Romans would renounce the 
right to see and question the witnesses of so stupendous a 
fact as that of an alleged resurrection from the dead. 

Now, as these letters more than sufficiently prove, that 
allegation was the sole ground on which St. Paul claimed 



190 CONCLUSION. 



the faith of any man. If it was not true that Christ had 
risen from the dead, he did not hesitate to say that the 
whole Gospel was a delusion, and worse than a delusion, 
since, in that case, Paul himself and all the other apostles 
who had "testified of God that He had raised up Christ," 
would be proved to be '* false witnesses of God." On the 
single fact of the resurrection St. Paul openly and un- 
equivocally staked, not only honor and all else that makes 
life dear, but life itself, and, what was more than any man's 
life, the whole truth of the Christian religion. 

On the faith of what testimony did he stake his life and 
honor here and his eternal salvation hereafter .? What evi- 
dence did he offer to others to unite with him in so com- 
plete an act of faith and trust } He tells the Corinthian 
Christians plainly, what his Gospel had been and the grounds 
on which it rested. He says: " I delivered unto you first 
of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for 
our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried; 
and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scrip- 
tures; and that He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve; 
after that He was seen of above five hundred brethren at 
once, of whom the most part remain unto this present, but 
some are fallen asleep. After that He was seen of James; 
then of the Apostles. And last of all He was seen of me 
also, as of one born out of due time." There are the wit- 
nesses : nearly five hundred living persons, not including 
Paul himself, many of whom were easily accessible at the 
time when these letters were written, and who continued to 
be still accessible for many years more. It is simply incredt 



conclusion: 191 



ible that these witnesses should not have been frequently and 
closely questioned. There is not a particle of reason to 
doubt that St. Paul himself had seen and intimately con- 
versed with many of the most important of them, as he de- 
clares that he did. It is absolutely certain that their testi- 
mony was convincing to him. It is just as certain that 
they believed their own witness, and that, like him, they 
had staked their life, their honor, all that makes the world 
enjoyable, and all that makes death hopeful, on their faith 
in the reality of the great fact of the resurrection of which 
they declared, in the face of imprisonment, torture and 
death, that they themselves were personal witnesses. 

I beg you to observe that I am not now arguing the 
sufficiency of this evidence. That is a subject by itself, 
and I know no one who has argued it more powerfully, or 
more convincingly, notwithstanding the fact that some part 
of his argument may require restatement, than Archdeacon 
Paley. But what I am now endeavoring to show is that, 
if we had no part of the New Testament to depend on but 
these four epistles of St. Paul, or in other words, if we were 
to admit the most extreme assertions of the most destruc- 
tive critics, who all leave us these four epistles, we should 
still have contemporary and documentary evidence of the 
foundation of the Christian Church, of its substantial faith, 
and of the ground on which that faith was proclaimed and 
received. In those epistles we find nearly all the great 
truths of Christianity incidentally recorded and most of 
them powerfully expounded. The doctrine of the Father, 
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is simply but suffi- 



192 CONCLUSION . 



ciently stated; and the doctrine of the Church, as the Body 
of Christ, united through Him with the Eternal Father, in- 
spired by the Eternal Spirit, and by Its holy inspiration 
guide into all truth and all forms of goodness, is pro- 
claimed, or rather assumed, with a simplicity which requires 
no exposition. I do not believe that any criticism will ever 
reduce the Christian documents of the apostolic age to these 
four epistles. I believe that further and more searching criti- 
cism will establish the authenticity and the substantial accu- 
racy of all the Books of the New Testament; yet I find a cer- 
tain satisfaction in the fact that if we should agree to disre- 
gard them altogether, the substance and the evidence of the 
Christian Faith would remain precisely what they were be- 
fore the youthful science of biblical criticism was thought of. 
In point of fact the whole tendency of criticism at this 
time is to admit the Gospels and many of the epistles to be 
of a far earlier date than former critics supposed; but here 
again, so far as the Christian evidences are concerned, we 
are under no necessity to press that point. On the con- 
trary, if we should admit that the Gospels and the epistles, 
with the exception of the four which are conceded to be 
authentic, were all of later dates, following each other from 
the close of the first to the close of the second century, we 
should still find in them the strongest conceivable evidence 
that the Christian faith had continued throughout that pe- 
riod to be the same faith which St. Paul taught and which 
all the other apostles of Christ taught, from the beginning. 
What the Christian faith was in the third century is easily as- 
certained from other authentic sources. What it was de- 



CONCLUSION. 193 



dared to be by the common voice of Christendom in the be- 
ginning of the fourth century we have already seen; and 
thus, if we were so rash as to accept the most extreme opin- 
ions of destructive critics of the New Testament as ascer- 
tained certainties, we should only establish a new and irre- 
fragable historical proof of the continuous identity of the 
Christian religion with the religion which St. Paul and all 
the Apostles delivered on the sure ground of the resurrection 
of our Lord, of which they were personal witnesses. I would 
gladly pursue this theme if time allowed; but time presses, 
and I must press on to another point. 

There is no reason why any Christian soul should dread 
the most searching criticism of the Holy Scriptures; and 
indeed it seems to me that to dread any veracious investiga- 
tion of them is unconsciously to confess a secret unfailh in 
their authenticity and authority which nothing has thus far 
justified. The criticism of texts and codices has done 
nothing but good; and the higher criticism of the sources 
and composition of the Sacred Books must ultimately do 
still more good, by enabling us to understand how the 
Providence of God has preserved for our instruction and 
edification in these later times, so many records of former 
revelations given to the fathers in the Prophets. But there 
is yet another criticism which is higher still, the highest 
criticism of all, though it may be practised by you and me 
as well as by the most learned and accomplished critics. 
Textual criticism is properly and necessarily microscopic; 
it is occupied with letters, words and phrases; so that a 



194 CONCLUSION. 



man might be a perfect textual critic, and yet never really 
know the Gospel. \Vhat is called the higher criticism is 
broader in its scope; yet its true domain is merely the 
sources, the composition, the structure and the history of 
documents. The highest criticism of which I speak is im- 
mediately addressed to the divine realities which give all 
their value to the documents and everything connected with 
them. The most imperfect translation of the most imper- 
fect codex of any one of the gospels reveals to the least 
critical of readers the record of a Life, the lineaments of a 
Character, and the evidence of a Person, which have drawn 
from millions of hearts and souls the verdict, that is to say 
the criticism, Truly this is the Son of God! Let us not be 
misled by a mere word. Criticism, after all, is nothing more 
than an exercise of judgment; and in the judgment of life 
and character the student may be far less trustworthy than 
the peasant or the man of business. Only the virtuous man 
can rightly judge the virtue of a character; only a spiritual 
man can rightly judge the evidence of spiritual qualities; 
only a holy man can recognize holiness; only the pure in 
heart can see God. So it may happen, and it happens every 
day, that the Son of God, revealed in the story of the Gos- 
pels, is seen, and known and worshipped by very babes in 
knowledge, while the wise and learned neither see nor know 
Him. It is with the heart that a man believeth unto right- 
eousness. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God! That, surely, is the highest criticism of all which 
brings to the investigation of a subject the only instrument 
with which it can be seen, or known, or rightly judged; and 



CONCLUSION. 195 



it is by the exercise of that highest of all critical faculties that 
the adoring recognition of mankind in general has been 
given, and always will be given, to the self-evident divinity 
of Jesus Christ. 

Let it not be said that such a judgment is not a truly 
rational judgment because it is not consciously reached by 
the forms and processes of logic. What we call the com- 
mon sense of mankind on any subject is never reached in 
that way. Yet it is always a satisfaction when such a 
judgment can be justified to the understanding and the 
reason; and I wish now to suggest one line of thought out 
of many which seem to me to show that the Life and Char- 
acter of Jesus Christ, as they are portrayed in the Gospels, 
are alone sufficient to convince the reason that He was 
verily the Son of God. 

It has been well said that no one but a man of the high- 
est genius should expose himself to the dangers of deceit. 
One falsehood leads to another, and that to a third, and 
soon, until the man is involved in a labyrinth from which 
there is no escape. Sometimes memory proves treacherous; 
the unfortunate forgets what he has said, and then he con- 
tradicts himself to his own confusion, as is often seen in courts 
of justice and elsewhere. The curious tricks of chance and 
circumstance can never be foreseen. Demonstrations of 
the truth come forward in the strangest way, by the oddest 
and most whimsical means, and in such a form that they 
can be neither faced down nor eluded by the most plausi- 
ble denials. Hence, unless a man could be sure that he 
will never forget a word of the falsehood he is tempted to 



196 CONCLUSION. 



utter, unless he had more than prophetic foresight to an- 
ticipate the possibilities of chance, and unless he could as- 
sure himself of a more than diabolical power to cover one 
falsehood with another to the end of time — unless, in short, 
he were endowed with the ingenuity, the versatility and the 
very genius of the Father of lies, he can never be certain 
that the idlest falsehood in the world might not involve him 
in ruin.. 

The most difficult of all falsehoods is the simulation of 
character. Even when its purpose is innocent, as in the 
dramatic art, nothing short of genius suffices to ensure suc- 
cess. The player struts and frets one little hour upon the 
stage, and yet, though thousands of well-educated and la- 
borious people study hard to represent particular characters 
in the few brief scenes of a play, not one in a thousand of 
them all attains to excellence. One false ring in the voice, 
the least exaggeration of display, a momentary lapse of 
memory, dispels the illusion he is striving to produce ; and 
so, with every aid that art can furnish, the actor fails to 
sustain a character for the brief hour of his engagement. 
When an actor does succeed, the world raves of his genius. 
Fame and fortune are his own, because the task of simu- 
lating character is recognized to be one of the most diffi- 
cult that man can undertake. 

It is very clear that the difficulty must increase or dimin- 
ish with the complexity or the simplicity of the character 
which is assumed. An actor might easily succeed as Ho- 
ratio who would make a sorry failure as the wise, mad 
Prince of Denmark. To represent the highest characters 



CONCLUSION. 197 



of the drama nothing less than the highest genius will avail. 
And all this, though a higher genius than the actor's has 
already conceived the character, predisposed its situations, 
and composed the very words the actor is to speak. That 
is the poet's task. How wonderful it is ! How impossible 
for anything but genius to achieve ! Since time began, not 
twenty men have mastered it, and only one of them reigns 
like a sun in the firmament of art ; the noblest of the rest 
are like noon-day moons beside him. Thus, perfectly to 
simulate a great human character demands the loftiest ef- 
forts of two men of genius ; one to create it, and the other 
to assume it in the action of a few brief scenes. 

What should we think of a person who should attempt — 
not for an hour upon the stage, not in the predetermined 
situations of a drama, not in the presence of a limited and 
sympathetic audience, but for years together, under every cir- 
cumstance that friendship could create or malignity devise, 
in the familiarity of daily intercourse and in the very hour 
and article of death — what should we think of a person who 
should undertake both to improvise and to simulate, not 
only the mightiest and most majestic of human characters, 
but a character which transcends the utmost reach of hu- 
man imagination, the Character of the Eternal Son of God ? 
Yet, according to the Gospels, Jesus did conceive that Char- 
acter, bore it for a life-time, never failed nor faltered in it, 
lived it through, and died in it, with its celestial glories 
radiant in His crown of thorns. To pretend that a few 
uneducated and deluded fishermen could have constructed 
such a Character is sheer absurdity ; and only to simulate 



198 CONCLUSION. 



that Character successfully would have sufficed to prove 
that Jesus must be more than man. To sustain it fault-* 
lessly would have surpassed the power of an archangel 
ruined. To have borne it falsely through a life of perfect 
innocence, with nothing to be gained by it but the reward of 
infamous and enormous guilt, would have been to present 
the impossible spectacle of principled mendacity as the mo- 
tive of spotless holiness, and of consummate wisdom acting 
for a whole life-time with consummate folly. Yet that is the- 
Character, which the Christ sustained, and nowhere in the 
action or the utterance of that transcendent drama has 
the world, to this day, found one flaw. To this day His 
calm challenge to His enemies remains unanswered : Which 
of you convicteth Me of fault ? The world has sought to 
find one single blot in that most marvelous Life that would 
be inconsistent with the perfectness of the Eternal Son of 
God; and it has sought in vain. Faults in His followers, 
God help them, it has found enough. Flaws in the Gospels 
it has magnified more than enough. In the very act of do- 
ing so, it has shown the inanity of the idea that the Gospel 
story is, or can be, an invention. But of Christ Himself 
the world is still forced to repeat the verdict of unhappy 
Pilate, and confesses that it finds no fault in this Man — not 
one word, one act, nor one single gesture that mars the 
majesty or sweetness of His Divine Humanity. The Char- 
acter which He claimed is perfectly original; it is without 
a parallel in human imagination. His method of discourse 
was without a model, as it is without a copy ; and sayings 
erroneously attributed to Him by apocryphal writers are 



CONCLUSION. 199 



as easily distinguished from His true sayings as modern 
English from the English of Chaucer. His Life would be 
inconceivable, if it were not a fact. Rousseau, comparing 
His death with that of Socrates, makes the just distinction 
that '' Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus died like 
a God." Taking the whole together, we may safely say 
that the conception alone, and much more the perfect pre- 
sentation of it, would be impossible, if it were not true. 
The coldest, calmest reasoning compels us to the utterance 
of the amazed centurion, Truly, this was the Son of God I 

For my own part, I am frank to confess that this argu- 
ment is that which, more than any other, constrains me to 
believe the Gospel to be self-evidently true. I read the sev- 
enteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, in 
which the evangelist has recorded Christ's last prayer on this 
earth — a prayer made in the immediate prospect of His 
death. It does not trouble me in the least to think that 
this or that verse may not contain the exact words used by 
the Saviour, or that other words which He did use may 
have been forgotten and omitted after many years. That 
prayer, on the face of it, is not an historical fiction of the 
evangelist; it is transparently a report. Satisfied of its sub- 
stantial accuracy as a report, I examine it, not coldly but 
appreciatively and sympathetically. I am moved by its 
unspeakable tenderness, by the pathos of its self- forge tful- 
ness, by its great humility, by its wondrous majesty, in all 
of which I see the perfect dutifulness of a child of man 
together with the consciousness and the recollections of 



200 CONCLUSION, 



the Son of God. The very gesture is impressive. ** Jesus 
lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour is 
come ; glorify Thy Son that Thy Son also may glorify Thee. 
I have glorified Thee on the earth ; I have finished the 
"work that Thou gavest Me to do. And now, O Father, glo- 
rify Thou Me with the glory that I had with Thee before the 
world was. I have manifested Thy Name unto the men 
that Thou gavest Me out of the world; Thine they were, and 
Thou gavest them Me, and they have kept Thy word. And 
ail mine are thine, and thine are mine ; and I am glorified 
in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these 
are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep 
through thine own Name those whom Thou hast given Me, 
that they may be one as We are. I pray not that Thou 
shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou should- 
est keep them from the evil. As Thou hast sent Me into 
the world, even so have I sent them into the world ; and 
the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them, that 
they may be one as We are one. I in them, and Thou in 
Me. that they may be made perfect in one, and that the 
world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved 
them as Thou hast loved Me. Father, I will that they also 
whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am ; that 
they may behold Thy glory which Thou hast given Me ; 
for Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world. 

righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee, but 

1 have known Thee, and these have known that Thou hast 
sent Me." I ask myself, Are these the words of an un- 
sound mind ? and I reply that if ever there was sanity on 



CONCLUSION. 201 



earth, it is in these words and in the Man who spoke them 
face to face with death. But if these are words of sanity, 
and if the Man Who spoke them was a sane Man, then 
these words are true, and the Man Who spoke them was 
the Son of God, preparing to return into the well-remem- 
bered glory He had had with the Eternal Father before the 
world was. No other alternative is possible. The writer 
of the Fourth Gospel never did, and never could have fabri- 
cated Jesus Christ ; never did, and never could have imag- 
ined such a Son of God; never did, nor could, nor would, 
have been guilty of the amazing blasphemy of putting such 
words into the mouth of any man who had not spoken 
them. In a time of great perplexity it was these words of 
Jesus Christ — of which I am confident that criticism can 
never take away the self-evident, self-demonstrating power 
— that enabled me, nay, compelled me, to believe that He 
Who spoke them could have been none other than the Son 
of God, and consequently that the Gospel story is and must 
be substantially true. That point settled, it followed merely 
as a corollary that the Church He founded here on earth 
must still exist, and that the one Faith of its Head and 
Master, once committed to that Church, must be still held 
by that Body. Or, in other words, that Christianity, as it is 
held and professed by nineteen-twentieths of the followers 
of Christ, must certainly be true in those particulars, at 
least, in which they still remain one in faith and life. 

But is not the very notion of an incarnation of Godhead 
in the person of any man inherently incredible ? In the 



202 CONCLUSION. 



world of mythology it is most assuredly so; but not so in 
the world of science. In the last lecture we saw how the 
Divine Reason may abide in this reasonable, though finite, 
universe, and how the Divine Power may be immanent 
therein, while neither the one nor the other is ever separated 
from the Divine Essence. Thus we saw how the universe 
in all its parts is a perpetual evidence of the Divine Presence 
in it. We saw moreover that it is in man himself that the 
reason and holiness of God are made most clearly evident 
by the intellectual and moral nature which must have been 
derived from God as surely as life and physical strength. 
Thus nature itself is an embodiment of God, so far as it is 
possible for nature to embody the Divine ; and every living 
man, in all but one respect, is an incarnation of God. 
That one respect is his individual personality. Every man's 
personality is his own, or rather it is himself, since it is that 
which differentiates him from every other creature of God. 
Neither nature in general nor the individual man are incar- 
nations of the Supreme Personality of God. Yet it is not 
impossible, and therefore not incredible, that, as God re- 
veals His reason and His power in nature and in man, He 
might also reveal His Person in the highest form in which 
such a revelation can be made to creatures like ourselves. 
That form could be no higher than our own, since ours is 
the highest we are capable of apprehending. It must there- 
fore be a human form ; and yet it could not be the form of 
any man having a personal individuality of his own, for 
then the personality of that individual man would be re- 
vealed, not the very personality of God. It seems, then, 



CONCLUSION. 203 



that no man born into the world as other men are could 
have been a true Theophorus, an Incarnation of the Divine 
Person. A body must be specially prepared, a true human 
body with a true and perfect human nature, but so united 
with the Divine Nature as, with It, to be one unique and 
perfect Personality, at once human and divine. In such a 
God-man God could be incarnate and reveal Himself to 
the utmost extent to which even God can ever reveal Him- 
self to creatures of our order in creation. In such a God- 
man we believe He did reveal Himself. We find nothing 
incredible about it, not even His amazing goodness and 
condescension ; but in what has just been said there is an 
illustration of the closeness with which every essential part 
of a true Christology fits in with every other part. Thus it 
is sometimes asked why Jesus Christ must needs have been 
conceived and born in any extraordinary way, and some 
modern theologians have been hasty in concluding that the 
story of his Virgin-birth is merely legendary, or, at most, 
of merely secondary importance. But if Christ was truly 
the Son of God, sent into the world to reveal the Divine 
Personality, the story of the Virgin-birth is necessarily true, 
since in no mere son of man could the sublime Personality 
of God be manifested to the sons of men. The more we 
study the gospels with the purpose of veraciously appre- 
ciating the Character and Person of Jesus Christ, the more 
surely, I believe, will that highest criticism constrain us to 
find in Him at once "the highest, holiest Manhood," and 
"all the fulness of the Godhead" bodily revealed. After 
such a study of the gospels, we are prepared to understand 



204 CONCLUSION 



the calm conviction with which an Apostle wrote: "That 
which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which 
we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon 
and our hands have handled of the Word of Life — for the 
Life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, 
and show unto you that Eternal Life which was with the 
Father and was manifested unto us — that which we have 
seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have 
fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the 
Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ." 

But here, it will be said, we are touching the miraculous 
side of Christianity, and we shall be told that the nineteenth 
century is incredulous of miracle. Strange, is it not, that 
a century which has accomplished thousands of wonders 
that any former century would have regarded as miracles, 
should reject the miraculous .? What are these nineteenth 
century miracles .? Are they violations of the laws of na- 
ture } Are they suspensions of the established order of na- 
ture .? Are they arbitrary interferences with the course of 
nature.? Not at all. They are simply intelligent applica- 
tions of the laws established in the orderly course of nature, 
so as to produce results which we desire. By his intelli- 
gence man is enabled more and more to assume the lord- 
ship of the unintelligent creation, not by violating, or sus- 
pending, or interfering with, the laws of the Creator, but by 
learning what those laws are, and by applying them to 
bring about certain desired results. Man himself is a part 
of nature, and whatever man does is within the course and 



CONCLUSION. 205 



order of nature. When he changes the face of nature, clear- 
ing it of primeval forests, planting a continent with new 
flora and introducing new fauna, turning the course of 
streams, draining natural lakes and profoundly modifying 
even the meteorological operations of the atmosphere, all 
this is as much within the course of nature and as thor- 
oughly according to the laws of nature as the ebb and flow 
of tides or the evolution and diff"erentiation of species. But 
if, as we believe, the Creator Himself abides in nature, then 
there is nothing incredible or unreasonable in the thought 
that He can apply the laws which He Himself has made, 
and which He alone perfectly understands, in countless 
ways of which man has thus far no knowledge. If He 
should ever do so, it might seem to human ignorance that 
the laws of nature had been over-ruled or suspended, not 
because it must be so, but because it would seem to men to 
be so. In the sense of a violation, or suspension, or inter- 
ference with the laws of nature — which are as much the laws 
of God as the Ten Commandmants — I do not believe there 
ever was a miracle; and in any other sense a miracle is 
neither more nor less than an unexplained phenomenon. 
In any other sense, therefore, nature itself is one continuous 
and universal miracle ; since neither nature itself nor any 
one of its phenomena has been or can be explained. Science, 
we are told, takes no account of the supernatural; and yet 
science itself, when it rises highest and sees furthest, con- 
fesses that the nature it investigates must have issued from 
a source beyond nature, so that the supernatural is the very 
origin and base of nature. Thus science testifies at last, as 



206 CONCLUSION 



history testifies from first to last, that — to use the language 
of Max Muller — '' nothing is so natural as the supernat- 
ural." 

Now, if the Origin and Cause of all nature were to mani- 
fest Himself in the Form of a INIan, I submit to you that it 
would be incredible that He should not do some things, 
nay, innumerable things, that would seem to be miraculous 
to other men simply because other men could not know 
how they were done. So clear is this, that, if there were 
no miraculous element in the Gospel story, the absence of 
miracle would be a valid objection to the truth of the story. 
Men would rightly refuse to believe that Divinity could ap- 
pear among men without exhibiting some signs of more 
than human knowledge in some marvellous and inexplica- 
ble acts of power. Not, however, because, in such a case, 
Divinity must abrogate its own laws, but because it could, 
and surely would, apply those laws in innumerable ways 
of which even the science of the nineteenth century knows 
nothing. 

I confess that I am not greatly concerned at the ingenious 
attacks which are directed against particular miracles re- 
lated by the evangelists. I am not at all disturbed when I 
am told that the occasional ''troubling" of the pool of 
Bethesda — which the evangelist himself supposed to be 
done by an angel — was a perfectly natural phenomenon, 
which may be witnessed to this day in at least one other 
well at Jerusalem; but I am amused to see how the attack 
upon the miracle brings out a confirmation of the history. 
I am not disconcerted when Mr. Huxley turns all the bat- 



CONCLUSION. 207 



teries of his great knowledge and his piercing wit on what 
he calls ''the swine-miracle" of Gadara; but I am inter- 
ested to observe how strangely the new investigations of 
hypnotism are showing possibilities of a double or triple 
consciousness in human beings. which would go far to ac- 
count for all the recorded phenomena of demoniac posses- 
sion ; and I am yet m.ore deeply interested to learn that 
possession itself, that is to say, the complete possibility of 
a domination of one personal and voluntary being by the 
will of another, is at last a verified fact of science. It would 
not disconcert me in the least if every one of our Saviour's 
recorded miracles were to be explained to have been only 
natural occurrences, so far as the forces or powers applied 
in doing them are concerned. I myself believe all of them 
to have been such, and I fully expect modern science to 
explain some of those marvellous works in that way. When 
it shall have done so, it will but confirm the credibility of 
the Gospel narrative ; it will take nothing from the evidence 
of Divinity in Him Who wrought such wonders at a time 
when no science had discovered how they could be done. 
It has been often said that miracle, which was once regarded 
as the main proof of the truth of Christianity, has now be- 
come its greatest difficulty; but if I am not mistaken, the 
time is fast approaching when science will remove the 
greater part of that difficulty, and simultaneously confirm 
the Gospel history, by showing that some, at least, of the 
Gospel miracles were no more miraculous than a conversa- 
tion through the telephone or even the lifting of a pebble 
from the ground. Let us not be too easily scared by a 



208 CONCLUSION. 



mere word used in an obscure sense. Miracle is a word 
which need scare no Christian from His faith, if he remem- 
bers that a miracle is nothing more than an unexplained 
event or an inexplicable phenomenon, that is to say, a fact 
or an occurrence, the cause or method of which he does 
not know. It is often hard enough to draw just conclu- 
sions from partial knowledge; it is always folly to attempt 
to reason from our ignorance; it is the very lunacy of self- 
conceit to imagine that nothing can be true which we are 
not able to explain. If our beliefs were to be limited by 
our power to explain facts and their phenomena, we should 
be able to believe in nothing — not even in our own exist- 
ence. 

With only one other suggestion concerning the evidences 
of Christianity this most imperfect course of lectures must 
be closed. In all scientific investigation it is an accepted 
rule that assertions of fact which have any reasonable ap- 
pearance of probability ought to be subjected to a process 
of rigorous verification, or, in other words, that they must 
be practically tested. We are more than willing that Chris- 
tianity shall be put to that test. We insist that it has a 
just claim to be verified. No candid man can affirm that 
Christianity is intrinsically absurd or incredible; we main- 
tain, on the contrary, that, to say the very least, it is highly 
probable, and that the advance of science is daily adding to 
its probability. On the strictest scientific grounds, there- 
fore, we are entitled to say that no man can rationally re- 
ject it without testing it for himself. 



CONCLUSION. 209 



The test is possible; it is simple; it is rational; it is not 
only safe — it is salutary; and it is proposed by Christ Him- 
self. No one denies that Jesus Christ was a great Teacher, 
and in ethics the greatest of all Teachers. Consequently it 
is possible, rational, safe and salutary to accept Him as our 
Teacher and adopt His moral principles of life. If we do 
so, He Himself assures us that we shall be happier and 
better men and that as we grow in happiness and goodness 
we shall likewise grow in knowledge and discernment of the 
truth or falsehood of His doctrine. '' Take my yoke upon 
you,'* He says; and by this He does not mean some artifi- 
cial rules of life which He would lay upon us, but that yoke 
of meek and loving dutifulness which He Himself bore in 
His earthly life. ''Take my yoke upon you, and learn of 
Me, and ye shall find rest in your lives." That is the tem- 
poral reward of those who take Christ as their supreme 
Teacher; but another and more precious promise is attached 
to the same course. " If any man is willing," He says, " to 
do the will of my Father which is in heaven, he shall know 
of the doctrine, whether it be of God. " We are ready to 
stand by that test and to abide its consequences; and we 
hold it to be only rational to test Christ's method in the only 
way in which it can be tested. 

We admit, indeed, that the test proposed calls into play 
other faculties than those which are exercised in logic; but 
then Christ appeals to the whole man and not only to his 
powers of syllogistic argument. It is to the whole man that 
He offers His guidance, not only to his reason. It is to the 
whole man that He promises the demonstration of the truth 



210 CONCLUSION. 

which is Himself. And man is more than mind; he is a 
living soul, with affections, passions, principles of life and 
judgment, which no syllogistic process can reduce to forms 
of logic. In all matters of life, that is to say in all mat- 
ters of supreme importance, it is the man, and not merely his 
reason, which sits in judgment and believes or disbelieves. 
** There is a sense,'' says Principal Caird, " in which all in- 
tense feeling transcends the limits of logic, and is capable 
of a richness and fulness of content which baffle definition 
and outstrip the comprehension of the hard and fast cate- 
gories of the understanding. Our most exalted spiritual ex- 
periences are those which are least capable of being ex- 
pressed by precise logical formulae." ''There are subjects 
of grave moment and questions of primary importance," 
says Joubert, ' ' in which the governing ideas ought to spring 
from the sentiments; all is lost if they are taken from else- 
where. To think what one does not feel is to lie to oneself. 
Whatever one thinks, he ought to think with his whole be- 
ing, soul and body." ''The heart," says Pascal, " has rea- 
sons of its own of which reason knows nothing; " and poor 
Buckle says that the heart is right. "The emotions," he 
tells us, "are as much a part of us as the understanding; 
they are as truthful; they are as likely to be right. Though 
their view is diiferent from that of the understanding, it is not 
capricious. They obey fixed laws; they follow an uniform 
and orderly course; they run in sequences; they have their 
logic and methods of inference." Professor Tyndal declares 
that "the circle of human nature is not complete without 
the arc of feeling and emotion. " I think I need not further 



CONCLUSION. 211 



press the truth that in all matters of supreme importance, 
and consequently in all matters of life and religion, the emo- 
tional nature, that is to say, the moral nature, is as important 
a factor in conducing to a just judgment as the understanding 
or the reason. At all events, I think you will admit that in 
all such matters, a right state of the moral and emotional 
nature is an indispensable condition of just judgment. 

And a right condition of the moral nature is precisely that 
which a true following of the ethics of our Lord is calculated 
to produce. By stilling the turbulence of the passions, by 
purifying the affections, by exalting the aspirations, it pre- 
pares the mind and heart and soul of man for the clear vis- 
ion of truth. But we are not to think of the ethics of Jesus 
as a hard and fast code of rules. More than in any or all 
even of His own recorded precepts, the ethics of Jesus are to 
be learned by studying Himself. There is no question of 
conduct so obscure that it may not be resolved at once 
and. positively if a true student of Jesus will only ask him- 
self, What would Jesus Christ have done in this case .? The 
answer will never be ambiguous. The right will always shine 
out clearer than the light of day; and if the case is such that 
two or more courses of conduct might be alike lawful, it 
will always appear that one of them is nobler than the rest, 
and that the choice of Christ would have been the noblest. 
I am persuaded that by such a personal following of Christ 
there will never fail to grow up in the student a more and 
more vivid sense of the continual and living Presence of the 
Master whom he follows, which nothing short of the reality 
of that Presence could account for. I believe, too, that 



212 CONCLUSION. 



there will grow in him a wondering love and trust of his 
Unseen Friend which no logic could formulate; and that, at 
last, my friends, is the one way, and the only way, to verify 
the claims of Christianity. Without that verification no 
other evidence is final or complete for any human soul. 
After it, other evidences may be useful; they are never indis- 
pensable. Professor Ruskin says, *' There is but one chance 
of life in admitting so far the possibility of the truth of 
Christianity as to try it on its own terms. ' Show me a sign 
first, and I will come,' you say. ' No,' answers God, ' come 
first, and then you shall see a sign. ' " So it has been in the 
life of the poetic prophet of this century, Alfred Tennyson. 
Fifty years ago, he gave the tribute of obedience to the 

" Strong Son of God, Immortal Love 

Whom we, who have not seen His face 
By faith, and faith alone embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove." 

In God, as He is revealed in Christ, the poet found assur- 
ance of a hope for men: 

" Thou wilt not leave us in the dust; 

Thou madest man, he knows not why; 
He thinks he was not made to die; 
And Thou has made him; Thou art just! * 

Not this faith alone, however, would have made Alfred 
Tennyson a Christian, if, musing on the mystery of human 
will, he had not learned to see and say, 

'* Our wills are ours to make them Thine." 

Having learned that one supreme and indispensable les- 



CONCLUSION. 213 



son, and having ruled his will to follow his Master's will, 
he now can wait serenely for that ''Crossing of the Bar" 
which awaits us all, smiling away the sorrow of the parting 
hour, and looking for the coming vision of the Friend who 
has walked beside him all along his earthly journey. So 
may it be to you and me, my friends. May we, too, have 
the confidence of a certain faith and the comfort of a reason- 
able, religious and holy hope when the time shall come for 
us to cross the bar ! As the shadows of the evening gather, 
may we find ourselves ready and glad to sing the Nunc 
Dimittis of the poet of our time: 

" Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar 
When I put out to sea; 

" But such a tide as, movmg, seems asleep, 
Too full for sound and foam. 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
Turns again home. 

"^Twilight and evening bell, 
And after that the dark ! 
And may there be no sadness of farewell 
When 1 embark ! 

" For, though from our bourne of time and place 
The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar ! " 



THE BEAUTIFUL LAND: 

PALESTINE, 

HISTORICAL, GEOGRAPHICAL AND PICTORIAL: 

DESCRIBED AND ILLUSTRATED AS IT WAS AND AS IT NOW IS, ALONG THE LINES OF 

OUR SAVIOUR'S JOURNEYS. 



JOHN FULTON, D.D., LL.D. 

Introduction by the Rt, Rev. Henry C. Potter, D.D. 

ILLUSTRATED BY FIFTEEN MAPS AND CHARTS, OVER THREE HUNDRED ENGRAVINGS, AND 
A GRAND PANORAMA OF JERUSALEM. 

" This handsome volume is especially designed for the large number of Bible students 
who never expect to visit the Holy Land. Dr. Fulton is a learned clergyman of the 
Episcopal Church, who ranks high as a clear, forcible and thoughtful writer, and his 
record of a leisurely journey made through Palestine is well worth reading. Many books 
have been written about the Holy Land, but hardly any of them are available for the uses 
of the ordinary student. , . . To take such a journey with a well-instructed and 
sympathetic cicerone, is a great privilege. In traveling it is not enough to see ; one 
needs also to know what to see and how to see it. Dr. Fulton does not simply reproduce 
the atmo- phere of the distant past so that it lives again before us, though he does that; 
but he relates to us in a pleasant fashion the later history of the localities whose story he 
tells, so that the chasm between the days of old and the present day is bridged over for 
the reader." — From the New York Tribune. 

" The title of this book is a full description of its character and contents. It is indeed 
a most valuable volume for the Christian student or traveler to the Holy Land. The idea 
of traveling along the lines of our Lord's journeys is certainly original, and the exceeding 
care and pains which Dr. Fulton has taken to be accurate in his statements and thorouE;h 
in every part of the work increase its value." — Front the New York Observer. 

" What a book, we think, for every Bible-teacher to be possessed of! Certainly, at 

least, no Sunday-school should be without one or more library copies for the teacher's 

reference, to the enlightenment of his task of making all things clear to the musing and 

questioning minds of the young. It is a compendium of all that is certainly known of that 

Beautiful Land, related in a style of rare attractiveness, and it will be found a fitting gift 

for pupils who have excelled in their Bible lessons and studies." 

— From the Living Church. 

STYLES. 

1. Handsomely bound in best silk cloth, with rich and artistic 
stampings in ink and gold on front cover and back. Price, $3.75. 

2. The same style, with full gilt edges. Price, $4.50. 

3. In half morocco binding, library style, strong and elegant. 
Price, $6.00. 

m^^ An Agent wanted in every parish. For terms apply to 

- THOMAS IHITTAKER, 2 ADD 3 BIBLE HOUSE, MEW YORK. 



THREE IMPORTANT WORKS IN 
CHURCH HISTORY. 



I. 
History of the American Episcopal Church. From the 

Planting of the Colonies to the End of the Civil War. 
By Rev. S. D. McConnell, D.D. Third Edition. 8vo, 
cloth, $2.00. 

"Among the most notable and valuable of the books that appeared during the past year — 
in the closing period of the book season— was, 'The History of the American Episcopal 
Church' from the planting of the colonies to the end of the Civil War. The author, the 
Rev. Dr. McConnell, is one of the most vigorous, clear-minded, progressive and valuable 
men enlisted in the ranks of the Protestant Episcopal clergy. He has given us a book of 
rare merit and great interest, one marked feature of which is its fairness, its determination 
to tell the true story of the Church without desire to give her more credit than she deserves, 
or withhold from her any of the praise to which she is entitled. . . . Not only do the 
literary execution of the work and the pervasive spirit of candor and impartiality deserve 
peculiar commendation, but one is struck with the patient and vigilant scholarship which, 
in depicting the relation of the Episcopal Church to the colonial communities, has sought 
out the original authorities.". — Buffalo Cojnvzercial, 

II. 

The Church in Nova Scotia, and The Tory Clergy of the 
Revolution. By Rev. Arthur Wentworth Eaton, 
B.A. i2mo, cloth, $1.50 net. 

" This is a book of historical value and interest, not merely to Anglican and Episcopalian 
Churchmen, but to all students of early American history. Nova Scotia ought to have a 
great deal of interest for Americans, for it was to that Province that thousands of New 
Vork and New England tories went at the time of the American Revolution. As might 
naturally be expected these tories were nearly all staunch and devoted Anglican Church- 
men, so that while on one hand their withdrawal seriously weakened the Episcopal Church 
ill this country, it made Nova Scotia, the oldest Colonial diocese of the Church of England, 
the most important centre of Anglicanism on this continent. That alone would make a 
chronicle of Anglicanism in Nova Scotia well worth reading even if it were not for the 
circumstance that it is also necessarily and inferentiallya history of the society and political 
life of the Province. 

" Mr. Eaton, who is himself a Nova Scotian, already distinguished in the world of letters, 
has done his work well. His study of the old archives of Nova Scotia has been thorough 
and painstaking. He is not only imbued with that genuine respect for facts which 
distinguishes the true historian, but he is also gifted with that sympathetic imagination 
, which is so essential for a comprehensive and lucid presentation of facts." — N. V. Tribune. 

III. 

The Constitution of the American Church: Its History and 

Rationale. The Bohlen Lectures for 1890. By Rt. Rev. 
William Stevens Perry, D.D. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 

" Bishop Perry could scarcely have rendered a more acceptable service to this genera- 
tion than he has done by writing this book. . . . We wish that our Bishops and all 
examining chaplains would insist upon the study of this book by candidates as a necessary 
qualification for ordination." — The Standard of the Cross, 



THOMAS IHITTAKER, 2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK. 



THE CYCLOPEDIA OF 
NATURE TEACHINGS. 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY REV. 

HUGH MACMILLAN, LL.D., F.R.S.E., 

AUTHOR OF "bible TEACHINGS IN" NATURE," ETC. 

Svo, Cloth Extra. Price, $2.50. Just Out. 

One of the most characteristic features of modern culture is the attention 
given to the facts, moods and suggestions of " Nature." 

Teachers and preachers are feeling the need for illustrations from 
Nature in their pulpit, platform and class work, and as the scientific 
knowledge and the love of Nature increase in schools and in congregations, 
there must be an increasing demand for illustrations taken from the spheres 
in which audiences are becoming daily more interested. 

The Cyclopasdia of Nature Teaclling'S is a collection of remarkable 
passages from the writings and utterances of the leading authors, preachers 
and orators, which embody suggestive or curious information concerning 
Nature. Each passage contains some important or noteworthy fact or state- 
ment which may serve to illustrate religious truth or moral principles, the 
extracts being gleaned from the widest and most varied sources. 

The passages are arranged alphabetically under subjects, and subdivided 
so as to elucidate the topic treated of and illustrate it in every possible way. 
Thus under the head of The Air, we find on this subject passages are 
given on The Beauty of Clouds, The Mysteries of the Clouds, 
Changes in the Sky, Mists and Sunshine, The Message of the 
Heavens, Sky Influences, Autumn, Sunshine, Plants, The At- 
mosphere, etc., etc. 

That the Cyclopaedia is a work of true value and reliable information will 
be seen by the names 6i the following authors, from whose writings, among 
many others, some of the extracts are taken, viz., RusKiN, Jefferies, 
Maclaren, McCook, Hugh Macmillan, Beecher, Smiley, Wilson, 
Pulsford, Guthrie, Froude, Lytton, Robertson, Arthur, Arnot, 
Herschel, Procter, Faber, Taylor, Dawson, Helps, Emerson, 
Dickens, Agassiz, Parker, Conder, Chalmers, Baldv^in, Brown, 
CuviER, Richter, Gcethe, etc. 

The volume forms a most valuable work of reference, and by its orderly 
arrangement puts its wealth of information and suggestion at the disposition 
of the student or teacher ; but the varied character of the selections, the 
freshness of the subjects treated, and the literary grace of many of the 
paragraphs will also make the work welcome to general readers. 

The Cyclopaedia of Nature Teaching's is furnished with a very 
copious index of subjects, and also one of Bible texts. 



HEW YORK : THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE. 



PROF. T. K. CHEYNE'S WORKS. 



The Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter, in 

the Light of Old Testament Criticism and the History of 
Religions. With an Introduction and Appendixes. Eight 
Lectures Preached before the University of Oxford in the 
Year 1889. 8vo, cloth, $4.00. 

"The Oriel Professor at Oxford (Dr. Cheyne) is an earnest, conscientious and 
industrious critic. His Bampton Lectures are the outcome of twenty years' study and 
research. He asks to be considered not a 'fledgeling,' but a critic of fully adequate 
experience, not a ' Germanizer.' but an honest English worker in Biblical exegesis. He 
settles on the principles of the ' higher criticism ' numerous disputed questions in regard to 
the.Book of Psalms." — N. V. Times, 

The Book of Psalms; or, the Praises of Israel. A new 

Translation, with Commentary. 8vo, cloth, $3.00. 

" We not only welcome this volume by the Canon of Rochester as a delight to scholars, 
but also commend it to all devout laymen and students who, believing the Bible to be the 
Word of God, may yet have to complain of having it expounded, and the Gospel preached, 
in seventeenth century phrase, and with the traditionalist's fear of the dreadful nineteenth 
century knowledge that is so rapidly cracking the rind of authorized opinions." 

— The Critic. 

The Prophecies of Isaiah. A new Translation, with Com- 
mentary and Appendixes. Revised. Two volumes in one. 
8vo, cloth, $4.00. 

" Mr. Cheyne's work is in many respects one of the most noteworthy of our day. , . 
He has been a devout and careful student of Isaiah for some twenty years past." 

—N. Y. Times. 

"We rejoice that a Commentary which must be marked 'indispensable,' is thus put 
within the reach of a larger number of those who love the great prophet." 

— Andover Review. 

"The qualities of Mr. Cheyne's Commentary would make it a good book in any 
language, or almost in any condition of Biblical learning. It is perspicuous without being 
superficial, and terse without the omission of anything of importance." — Academy, 

Job and Solomon ; or, the Wisdom of the Old Testament. 

8vo, cloth, $2.50. ^ 

"This is certainly one of the most fascinating and delightfully readable works in 
Biblical criticism that has come under our eye for a long time. If Robertson Smith or 
Welhausen had a style like that of Cheyne the rapidly advancing science (or art) of 
Biblical criticism would soon be amazingly popular." — The Critic. 

The Hallowing of Criticism. Nine Sermons on Elijah, 
Preached in Rochester Cathedral. i2mo, cloth, red edge, 

^2.00. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher, 

2 and 3 Bible House, New York. 



THE RIGHT ROAD 

A Hand-Book for Parents and Teachers. 

BY THE 

Rev. JOHN W. KRAMER. 

12nio, cloth binding, - - Price, $1,25. 



** There is not a dull page in it. Even the bad boy who dislikes moral 
lectures will like pleasant chats : he will take the moral pills for the sake 
of their sugar coating, if for nothing else. Parents will find this excellent 
book helpful in getting their children on the right road and keeping them 
there. " — The Home Journal. 

" ' The Right Road' presents John W. Kramer's plan of giving instruc- 
tion to children, and of arousing their personal interest in the principles and 
practice of Christian morality. By means of simply worded observations, 
and a great variety of short stories, he undertakes to teach a child something 
about personal responsibility, right and duty. Under duty, instruction and 
illustrations are given concerning duties to one's self — such as cleanliness, 
temperance, truthfulness, courage, self-control, order, thrift, culture and 
purity, duties to others — honor of parents, patriotism, honesty, justice, 
mercy, philanthropy, courtesy, gratitude and kindness to animals, duties to 
God — embracing reverence, worship and service." — Tke Interior. 

" As a treatise on practical ethics the book has decided merits. It 
treats of nearly all aspects of morality, setting forth the nature and the 
obligation of the various kinds of duty in a clear and simple style and in a 
manner likely to interest the young. The different virtues and vices are 
illustrated by numerous examples in the story form, some of them historical, 
other fictitious, and many of them are fitted not only to illustrate the habits 
of good conduct, but to inspire the reader with a love for them. The book 
is more manly than such books usually are, the strong and positive virtues 
being given the importance that justly belongs to them. The last section of 
the book and duty to God is excellent, and is by no means uncalled for in 
times like these." — Critic. 



THOMAS IHITTAKER, 2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK. 



AUBREY L. MOORE'S WRITINGS. 



"With preachers like Phillips Brooks and M. Bersier the late Rev. 
Aubrey L. Moore was not unworthy to take rank, though his strength lay, 
perhaps, in delicacy of spiritual perception rather than in the more ordinary 
and popular forms of pulpit eloquence." — The London Times. 

I. 

Sermons Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. By 

the late Rev. Aubrey L. Moore. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 

Jtist Out. 
II. 

The Message of the Gospel. By the late Rev. Aubrey L. 

Moore. i2mo, cloth, 75 cents. 

This volume contains three addresses on the Message of the Gospel ; 
two on Vocation ; and six sermons before the University of Oxford on the 
following topics : " The Veil of Moses," " The God of Philosophy and the 
God of Religion," " The Claim to Authority," " The Power of Christ on 
Moral Life," "The Presence of God in the Christian and the Church," 
" Decision for God." 

" In bulk this is a small book, but like a jewel casket, small itself, its 
contents are of great price." — The Churchman. 

III. 

Some Aspects of Sin : Three Courses of Lent Sermons. 

By the late Rev. Aubrey L. Moore. i2mo, cloth, 
75 cents. 

IV. 

Science and the Faith. Essays of Apologetic Subjects. 
With an Introduction. Second Edition. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher, 

2 and 3 Bible House, New York. 



CANON FARRAR'S SERMONS. 



I, 

EVERY-DAY CHRISTIAN LIFE; 

Or, Sermons by the Way. 
By Frederick W. Farrar, D.D. i2mo, cloth, $1.25, 

" These sermons by Canon Farrar are the ordinary discourses of 
a parish priest to a customary congregation. They are upon subjects of 
every-day life. There is no wide-ranging speculation among them ; 
nothing to gratify the seeker after suggested heresies, or at least the 
novelties of modern rationalism. But they are very delightful sermons 
to read — full of tender thought and happy suggestion, and written in a 
style which when the English clergy do attain it is one of the happiest 
known to the pulpit. As the other extreme of English preaching, the dead- 
and-alive manner of mere perfunctory talk is hateful to the last degree, 
so is this, its opposite, peculiarly pleasant." — llie Churchman. 

II. 

TRUTHS TO LIVE BY : 



A Companion to " Every-Day Christian Life." 
By the same author. i2mo, cloth, $1.25. 

" This is a volume of practical sermons written in a style free from 
niere technical language. The discourses are just what Dr. Farrar 
claims them to be — simple pastoral sermons. They deal mainly with 
doctrinal and fundamental subjects as they represent an attempt " to make 
clear some of the most essential truth of Christian faith." — The Observer. 



Contemporary Pulpit Library. 

New Sermons by the leading Anglican Preachers. Square 
1 2 mo, cloth, gilt top, f i.oo each. 

No. I. FIFTEEN SERMONS. By Canon Liddon. 

No. 2. SIXTEEN SERMONS. By Bishop Magee. 

No. 3. TWENTY SERMONS. By Archdeacon Farrar. 

No. 4. FOURTEEN SERMONS. By Canon Liddon. 

No. 5. FIFTEEN SERMONS. By Bishop Lightfoot, 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 AND 3 Bible House, New York. 



THE DIVINE LITURGY. 

Being the order for Holy Communion historically, doc« 
trinally, and devotionally set forth in fifty portions. By 
the Rev. Herbert Mortimer Luckock, D.D., Canon 
of Ely. 414 pp. 1 2mo, cloth, $2.00. 

"We can heartily recommend this as one of the best things of the 
kind yet pubhshed for the general reader. It treats of the history of all 
parts of the service, rubrics, the text itself, technical and liturgical terms 
and expressions, and also the ritual acts in rendering the service, giving 
brief expositions of the meaning and teaching, with practical suggestions 
of a devotional character. The author's position is that of a positive 
but conservative Churchman, in the best sense Catholic. His style is 
clear and simple." — Pacific Churchman. 

" We gladly give our recommendation of "The Divine Liturgy" 
in its historical aspect, and add that we can think of nothing equal to it 
in trustworthiness and wide array of facts." — The Christian Union. 

"The Catholic mindedness, historical accuracy, and wise caution, 
of Canon Luckock is nowhere more apparent than in this important 
work. It will prove a most valuable help to the parochial clergy in the 
regular instruction of communicant classes, a design which he had in 
view in its preparation. The book is in fifty portions, so that in the 
case of monthly instruction, it would extend as a manual of aid for a 
period of four years," — Living Church, 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

AFTER DEATH. An Examination of the Testimony of tlie 
Primitive Times respecting the state of the Faithful Departed and 
their Relationship to the Living. Fifth edition, revised. i2mo, 
cloth. $1.50. 

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE PRAYER BOOK. 

With Appendices. Second edition. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 

FOOTPRINTS OF THE SON OF MAN, as traced by 
St. Mark. Being eighty portions for private study, family reading 
and instruction in Church. With an Introduction by the Lord 
Bishop of Ely. New and cheaper edition, complete in one volume. 
i2mo, cloth, $1.75. 

THE BISHOPS IN THE TOWER. A Record of Stirring 
Events affecting the Church and Non-conformists from the Restor- 
ation to the Rebellion. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

2 AND 3 Bible House, New York. 



CANON ROW'S NEW BOOK. 



CHRISTIAN THEISM. • 

A Brief and Popular Survey of the Evidences upon which 
it rests, and the Objections urged against it considered and 
refuted. By C. A. Row, M.A. Small 8vo, cloth, Si-75- 

"Prebendary Row has attained high repute by his previous publi- 
cations, but we doubt if he has written anything more likely to be useful 
than the present volume, in which he sets forth in a popular form and 
with clearness and force of style the chief reasons on which Christian 
theistic belief is founded. It is avowedly a popular argument, adapted 
to the needs of the multitude of people who justly complain that many 
excellent treatises dealing with the subject are 'over their heads.' It 
also claims to be a comprehensive survey of the whole question as it is 
now debated, and grapples with current difficulties and objections which, 
if they do not subvert the faith of many, do nevertheless prevail with 
some, and cause widespread disquiet and perplexity." 

— The Standard of the Cross. 

' ' Among all the works of Prebendary Row in the general line of 
Apologetics of Christian belief, and they are many, this will be the most 
prominent in the list, the most thoroughly and lastingly useful." 

— The Living Church. 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

REASONS FOR BELIEVING IN CHRISTIANITY. 

Addressed to busy people. i2mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents. 

CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE VIEWED IN RELATION TO 
MODERN THOUGHT. Bampton Lectures for 1877. Fourth 
Edition. 8vo, cloth, $3.75- 

A MANUAL OF CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES. i6mo, 
cloth, 75 cents. 

FUTURE RETRIBUTION, VIEWED IN THE LIGHT 
OF REASON AND REVELATION. Svo, cloth, $2.50. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

2 AND 3 Bible House, New York. 



Reason and Authority 
IN Religion. 

By J. MACBRIDE STERRETF, D.D., Professor ol 
Ethics and Apologetics in Seabury Divinity School. 
Author of " Studies in Hegel's Phdosophyof Religion." 
i2mo, cloth, $i.oo. 



press IRotices: 

" A philosophical, keen and c'ever mind has given us in brief form, 
one of the most satisfactory studies upon these important topics that we 
ever tried." — The Living Church. 

" A thoughtful and prudent balancing of the arguments and con- 
siderations that are apt to be uppermost in the speculations of open and 
inquiring minds in these times." — The Independent. 

'■ I have never seen so much thought put into so narrow limits 
or so clearly and concisely stated." — Rev. E. A. Warriner. 

" This book is a vigorous essay on the burning question regarding 
the seat of authority in religion. It is marked throughout by candor, 
vigor and incisiveness of thought and will repay a careful reading." — 
The N^ew Englander and Yale Review. 

" The author of this volume has already become favorably known 
to all thinkers upon such themes by his ' Studies in Hegel's Philosophy 
of Religion.' His honesty and fairness, his clearness of statement, 
and the vigor of his style unite to form a model in this method of dis- 
cussion, it is a book compelling close thought, and filled with stimu- 
lating, healthful, mteresting work for good thinkers or those who would 
become such." — Public Opinion. 

" He writes as a scholar and a philosopher, and his discussion in 
the present work is timely and fitted to restrain adventurous minds 
rom dangerous extremes." — The Interior. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

PUBLISHER, 



CHRIST IN THE NEW 
TESTAMENT. 

By THOMAS A. TIDBALL, D.D., Rector of St. Paul's 
Church, Camden, N. J. With an Introduction by 
S. D. McCoNNELL, D.D. i2mo, cloth, $1.25. 



"We notice on nearly every page the extensive reading of its 
author and the judicial mind, which not only attempts but proves the 
authenticity of the New Testament Books and their drift and purpose. 
The first lecture is to us the most striking ; but all show learning and 
the Christian spirit. We know of no work which in like compass in- 
troduces !-o well the various books of the New Testament." — The 
Southern Churchman. 

" The volume is scholarly, reverent, gracefully written, spiritual in 
tone ; a really good book that makes one better as it clears his mind 
and lifts his heart." — Every Thursday. 

*' Dr. Tidball's style is felicitous for the lecture room, exact in ex- 
pression, careful in the right presentation and due rounding of his facts, 
and agreeably free fiom any pedantries of learning." — Living Church. 

"It can stand on its own merits as a popular presentation of a sub- 
ject of perennial freshness." — The Critic. 

" While there is little that is directly polemic in these pages, this 
purpose is largely attained, and that in the best possible manner. To 
each of the writers of the New Testament the question is virtually ad- 
dressed, ' What think ye of Christ ? ' and the answer is of great apolo- 
getic value. Through all the obvious differences of style and treatment 
can be seen the one Lord and Saviour, and these apparent variations 
serve only to sive a clearer outline of the life and work of the Great 
Exemplar. " — Churchman . 

" The introductory chapter to this volume, consisting of thirty 
pages, is in substance very similar to the ' Introduction to the New 
Testament ' as commonly found in good commentaries. It treats of the 
origin and formation of the several books of their authors, of their 
general scope, and of recent criticism. It also gives an excellent 
definition of inspiration — the manner and measure of it. Then follow 
nine other chapters in which the author gives a study of the whole New 
Testament, in groups of books — the Synoptic Gospels, St. John's 
Gospel, The Acts, the Pauline Epiftles, etc., the main object being to 
bring out their testimony to Christ as the Son of God and Saviour of 
the World." — Pacific Church?nan. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

PUBLISHER, 
2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE HOUSE. • NEW YORK. 



A Book of Questions and Answers on the Doctrines, Usages^ 
and History of the Church as suggested by the Liturgy. 
For Parochial and Sunday-school uses. By Rev. Nelso^t 
R. Boss, M.A. i6mo, paper covers, 20 cents, net. 

The design of this book is three-fold, (i). To familiarize the reader with 
the Doctrines, History and Ritual of the Church, as they are suggested by the 
Offices ; (2). To bring out clearly and concisely those principles of Historic 
Christianity which distinguish the Episcopal Church f om all other religious 
bodies ; (3). To furnish clear and concise answers to the popular objections so 
commonly raised against the Church by those not familiar with her ways. 

Bishop Seymour says : 

Whoever reads " The Prayer-Book Reason Why" will find it a treasury of 
useful information. 1 welcome it heartily. I believe its publication will be 
eminently useful and Leneficia . It covers a great deal of ground and instructs 
as it goes forward. 

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Buel, Emeritus Professor of Systematic 

Divinity in the General Theological Seminary, says : 

The book is a desideratum which I wonder has not been disclosed before. 
That it is eminently fitted to do great good I cannot doubt, and that it will be 
a most useful book in the hands of the pastors of the Church I firmly believe. 
Throughout the work the Church herself has spoken for the benefit of her 
children. 

Bishop Littlejohn says : 

To thousands of adult members of the Church, if the book could only be 
placed in their hands, it would be a valuable help to clear and sound thinking, 
on the very important subjects of which it treats. 

Mr. Whittaker, the Publisher, says : 

In almost every case where I send out a sample copy of "The Prayer- 
Book Reason Why," more copies are immediately ordered. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THOS. WHITTAKER, 2 and 3 Bible House New York, 

And For Sa'e by all Church Booksellers. 



HISTORY OF THE 

AMERICAN EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 

FROM THE PLANTING OF THE COLONIES TO 
THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR. 

By S. D. McCONNELL, D.D., 

Rector of St. Stephen'' s Churchy Phila. 

8V0, CLOTH, PLAIN, $2.00; WITH GILT TOP, $2.25 J IN HALF CALF OR HALF MOROCCO, $3.00. 



OPINIONS. 

"... glad to possess a book of so much in- 
terest connected with the American Church." — 
The Archbishop of Canterbury. 

'' . . . so vigorous, concise and pregnant, so 
fair and large, so .entertaining with restrained 
wit, and so sensible." — Bishop Huntington. 

'' . . . racy and altogether delightful. It will 
do a world of good both within and without the 
Church." — Rev. Dr. Wm. R. Huntington. 

** . . . a good piece of work well done, satis- 
factory and honest, and which will stand." — 
Bishop Hugh Miller Thompson. 

'^ . . . the whole book has flavour, and no- 
where falls into feebleness." — Dr. S. Weir 
Mitchell. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
publieber, 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE, - - - NEW YORK. 



THE CHIEF THINGS; 

OR, CHURCH DOCTRINE FOR THE PEOPLE. 

By REV. A. W. SNYDER. 

12 mo, Cloth binding, $i,oo. Paper covers, 50 Cents. 



'■' It is just what we want.'' — Bishop Whitehead. 

"It is an indispensable aid in parish work." — Rev. C, W. 
Leffingzuell, D.D. 

" The author has gathered into a volume twenty-six essays on 
just those topics and questions pertaining to Church faith and wor- 
ship, on which a multitude of people, both without and within our 
congregations, need to be instructed. The statements are always 
clear, concise, direct, and persuasive. There is nothing extravagant, 
overwrought, fantastic, or bitter. Many of the essays would make 
excellent chapters for lay reading." — Rt. Rev. F. D. Huni^noton, 
D.D. 

" It does not deal with the one thing needful in order to be 
saved, but with a considerable number of things th;t is necessary to 
believe, in order to be sound. It is written in a stirring, off-hand 
way, and the person who reads it carefully, and uses it freely, will 
be a perpetual thorn in the flesh of all sectarian associates, and 
generally regarded by disinterested parties as decidedly a tough nut 
to crack. H ne book is a beautiful specimen of t}pographical art." 
— Standard of the Cross. 

" It enunciates the ' Chief Things ' so clearly that the way- 
faring man, though a fool, can hardlv mistake the meaning. The 
thoughts are so clear and clean cut, that the book must be helpful 
to many seekers after truth and the Church." — Rt. Rev. IV. A. 
Leonaid, D.D. 

" The Church throughout this land of ours is badly in need of 
just such teaching as this book contains." — Rt. Rev. E. G. Weed, 
D.D. 

*^* Copies sent by mail, postage free, on receipt of price. 

THOMAS WHITTAKER, . 

2 and 3 Bible House, NEW YO«K. 



Thoughts on Life, Death 
and Immortahty. 

Selected from the uapublished writings of the late Samuel 
Smith Harris, Bishop of Michigan. By Charlotte 
Wood Slocum. i2mo, cloth, gilt edges, $i ; cloth 
plain, 75 cents. 



" These thoughts of Bishop Harris are simply admirable." — Southern 
Churchman. 

" The work of selection has been performed by Charlotte Wood 
Slocum, who knew Bishop Harris intimately, and was fully aware of his 
extreme sensibility to print. She has done her task with taste and judg- 
ment, and both religion and literature are enriched by her efforts." — 
Chicago Post. 

"There is in these thoughts the originality which comes from 
personal and independent experience, there is the fiery glow that faith 
and hope alone minister, there i the simplicity that sheer earnestness 
alone finds utterance in." — The Churchman. 

"A collection of solid nuggets and polished gems." — The 
Independent. 

*' They show the writer had profited by experience in the school of 
life, and the practical sagacity lends additional value to the brief dis- 
courses, which have a delightfully unpremeditated air. Evidently ihe 
Bishop understood how far every man may make his own world. It is 
rather singular that these passages do not appear to suffer from loss of 
context, but the lack of elaboration only serves to throw the thought 
into higher relief. These are tonic utterances, and show a manly spirit ; 
the remarks on responsibility and the issues of life may be taken as 
typical extracts. "--Z>^/wzV Fne Press. 

" This little volume of extracts furnishes new proofs of the high 
ideals cherished by Dr. Harris, of his catholicity of spirit, and of his 
loyalty to Christ's gospel." — The Interior, Chicago. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

PUBLISHER, 
2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE, - NEW YORK. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 653 747 9 






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